Speaker: Misza
Job title: former Co-President, co-leader of the Orthodoxy Working Group
Company: European Forum of LGBTI+ Christian Groups

About the spreaker
Misza Czerniak is a human rights defender, interpreter, journalist, and musician born in Moscow, Russia, and living in Warsaw, Poland, since 2011. He holds MSc and MA, being professionally trained in linguistics, IT and choral conducting. Misza has been involved in various levels of project management, research and international cooperation facilitation, particularly in the area of human rights and social change, at such organisations as Civil Society Forum e.V. and Ashoka. Being a gay man, he is an LGBTIQ+ activist, operating both locally in Poland and internationally. Since 2014, he has been the conductor of Voces Gaudii, the first LGBTIQ+friends choir in Poland. As a person of faith (an Orthodox Christian), his queer activism is focused on the intersection between LGBTIQ+ issues and religion. In 2022-2026, he served as the co-president of the European Forum of LGBTI+ Christian Groups, an umbrella ecumenical association of over 40 groups from all over Europe that is the leading voice of the community of queer persons of faith in political and church spaces. He is the author of the Open Letter of Orthodox LGBT persons to the Holy and Great Council of Orthodox Church in Crete 2016, a first-of-its-kind public document putting the words "LGBT" and "Orthodox" in the same sentence and bringing attention to the cause on such a scale. He co-edited the very first volume on Orthodoxy and inclusion titled “For I Am Wonderfully Made”, a collection of papers, testimonies, roundtable transcripts and other texts that came out in English in 2016 and Russian in 2018. Misza has been writing and speaking about the various aspects of the gender/sexuality/religion/politics intersection, especially in the context of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Currently, Misza works as a morning news show anchor on Vot Tak TV, Russian-language TV channel of the Polish state television, broadcasting to former Soviet countries over satellites, cable networks and YouTube. He lives with Krystian, his partner of 8 years. Misza's 21-year-old daughter Aleksandra is a college student in Amsterdam.