About

Autumn de León (she/they) is an English MA student at the University of Victoria. Her research focuses on book history, print culture, and trans studies. While completing her B.A. in English at UC Berkeley, she became invested in the book arts through The CODEX Foundation. At UVic, she is researching how manual labor within fine press functions as a site of authority, shaping how the materiality of printed objects affects their reception. She is especially interested in how trans* small press projects use the aesthetics of fine press to 'pass' within aesthetically conservative contexts.

Autumn's academic work informs her art practice. She is the co-creator of Lavender Corazón Press, a small press producing artists' books that engage with queer and Latine thought. Her 2026 artists' book, An Archive, presents a series of questions asked by medical gatekeepers as preconditions for receiving gender-affirming care. Printed letterpress on archival papers in a nonarchival enclosure, the book is held in institutional collections including the Bancroft, Bodleian, and Thomas Fisher Rare Books Libraries.

With the book object's form as a lodestone, Autumn is interested in how knowledge is produced and archived, and how those processes inevitably alter the messages they seek to disseminate.