Biography
Author and playwright Dr. Ronni Sanlo is the Director Emeritus of the UCLA Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center (LGBT) Center and a frequent keynote speaker and consultant on LGBT issues in Higher Education. Now retired, Dr. Sanlo was the Senior Associate Dean of Students and professor/director of the UCLA Masters of Education in Student Affairs. In a previous life, Dr. Sanlo was an HIV epidemiologist in Florida. She earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Florida, and a masters and doctorate in education from the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. Ronni is the originator of the award-winning Lavender Graduation, a commencement event that celebrates the lives and achievements of graduating LGBT college students. Ronni continues to research and write with a focus on LGBT history which is the foundation for the award-winning documentary Letter to Anita. Her memoir is The Purple Golf Cart: The Misadventures of a Lesbian Grandma. Her most recent publication is The Soldier, the Avatar, and the Holocaust, an historical novel about the last five months of WWII. . She has written and produce her readers' plays Sing Meadowlark, Dear Anita Bryant (for which she received second place for the Robert J. Pickering Playwriting Excellence award, and The Soldier and the Time Traveler. She is working on a musical that depicts the lesbian and gay witch hunts of the 1950s in Florida, as well as a play depicting the history of lesbians. She lives with her wife, Dr. Kelly Watson, in Palm Springs, CA and Sequim, WA. Ronni may be emailed at ronnisanlo@gmail.com
