SESSIONS

Anastasia Lopez is an award-winning radio, TV and digital journalist, a freelance foreign correspondent for Ö1, and co-founder of BAIT, the first journalistic fact-checking channel on TikTok. Her work focuses on disinformation, digitalization, the climate crisis and gender equality.

Natascha Ditha Berger is a psychotherapist (Integrative Therapy), clinical sexologist (Sexocorporel) and internationally certified Brainspotting trauma therapist. She works with individuals, couples and groups, and is also a life and social counselor, NLP trainer and adult educator. Since 2014, her psychotherapy practice has been kink-aware and open to complex relationship structures such as consensual non-monogamy and polyamory. Natascha is a founding member and president of KAPA.

Sabine Lex leads Lust auf Reden (“Up for Talking”), an Austria-wide campaign by Aids Hilfe Wien that helps people talk openly about sexual health – with partners, with doctors, at school, and in everyday life. She co-developed the campaign and its expert forums, including Reife Lust, a forum on sexual health in later life. At Aids Hilfe Wien, she also works with migrants and other vulnerable groups. She regularly presents at professional conferences in Austria, sharing practical tools and research findings, such as results from a patient survey on sexual health.

Mimi Schippers is Professor of Sociology and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. She has been practicing CNM and polyamory for several decades and researching polyqueer sexualities for 15 years. She is author of Polyamory, Monogamy, and American Dreams:

The Stories We Tell about Poly Lives and the Cultural Production of Inequality
Beyond Monogamy: Polyamory and the Future of Polyqueer Sexualities
Rockin’ Out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock

She is currently working on her 4th book tentatively titled:
Feeling Poly: The Affective Dimensions of Polyamory and the Politics of Belonging.

Taylor K. Sparks is an Ethical Non-Monogamy Coach and Holistic Sexual Wellness Educator based in Málaga, Spain. She is the founder of OrganicLoven.com, one of the largest BIPOC-owned intimacy retailers in the U.S.

Drawing on more than 17 years of lived ethical non-monogamy within a 25-year marriage and over a decade of professional coaching, Taylor guides individuals, couples and throuples through the conversations most people avoid – jealousy, boundaries, communication, and building relationships on their own terms.

She is the author of An African-American Guide to Ethical Non-Monogamy and its companion workbook, and the creator of the free ENM Quiz and the Ethical Non-Monogamy Companion App, the first AI coaching companion built specifically for the ENM community. Her work has been featured in more than 300 media articles, including in Cosmopolitan, Oprah Daily and Forbes, and on Bravo’s Married to Medicine.

Reinhard Gaida-Leath is a New York–based coach, speaker and event organizer. As the founder of Intimate Futures and Schwelle Festival, he creates conferences, festivals, retreats and workshops centered on relationships, sexuality and personal growth. As a coach and workshop leader, he helps people find clarity, self-determination and joy, drawing on more than 20 years of experience in breathwork, hypnosis, NLP and embodiment. He also developed Playfight, a format he has facilitated more than 450 times. His work bridges psychological expertise, body-oriented practices and conscious communication to support deep personal and relational transformation. He holds a Master of Science in Coaching from Sigmund Freud University Vienna and has completed extensive training in NLP, breathwork, hypnosis and counseling.

Jessica Fern is a best-selling author and integrative therapist with more than 25 years of experience supporting personal and relational transformation. Her work draws on conflict transformation, trauma therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), somatic and narrative approaches, attachment theory, and spiritual and shamanic counseling traditions.

She is the internationally recognized author of Polysecure and co-author of Polywise and her newest book, Transforming the Shame Triangle.

Through her private practice and teaching, Jessica works with individuals, couples and multi-partner relationships to help them move beyond reactive patterns, cultural conditioning, insecure attachment and unresolved trauma – supporting greater self-leadership, emotional resilience and intimacy in life and love.

Anastasia Lopez is an award-winning radio, TV and digital journalist, a freelance foreign correspondent for Ö1, and co-founder of BAIT, the first journalistic fact-checking channel on TikTok. Her work focuses on disinformation, digitalization, the climate crisis and gender equality.

Anastasia Lopez is an award-winning radio, TV and digital journalist, a freelance foreign correspondent for Ö1, and co-founder of BAIT, the first journalistic fact-checking channel on TikTok. Her work focuses on disinformation, digitalization, the climate crisis and gender equality.

Sina Muscarina is a psychologist, sexologist and social entrepreneur with a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Vienna. She is a co-founder and member of the scientific committee of the biennial Non-Monogamies and Contemporary Intimacies Conference (NMCI), first held in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2015.

She works as a psychiatric and mental health nurse in Switzerland and as a counseling psychologist in private practice. Her work bridges a range of effective methods for exploring the spectrum of consciousness and supporting psychological well-being. Having lived in New York, Miami and Lisbon, she loves immersing herself in vibrant cultures and traveling the world.

Antonia Velicu is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology at the University of Zurich. Her work asks what counts as normal in love, sexuality and family life – and how these norms shift as people live differently. Since her early research on polyamorous families, she has studied non-nuclear and non-monogamous relationships, and together with Heiko Rauhut she is now building one of the first large-scale studies of consensual non-monogamy in the German-speaking world. Alongside her research, she runs the Instagram account Sociology Unpacked, making sociology accessible to a wider public.

Birgit Leichsenring is a microbiologist specializing in biomedical science communication, with a focus on HIV. As a member of the Vienna Chemsex Network, she works to raise awareness about chemsex and sexual health, bringing together experts from medicine, counseling and community work. The network’s efforts led to Austria’s first online orientation tool on chemsex.

She regularly speaks at conferences, community events and Pride festivals across Austria on chemsex, HIV, PrEP and sexually transmitted infections. She is known for making scientific knowledge accessible, engaging and free of judgment.

Matthias Skocic is a specialist in dermatology and venereology, focusing on HIV, HIV PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). He teaches these subjects to medical students at Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz.

Anastasia Lopez is an award-winning radio, TV and digital journalist, a freelance foreign correspondent for Ö1, and co-founder of BAIT, the first journalistic fact-checking channel on TikTok. Her work focuses on disinformation, digitalization, the climate crisis and gender equality.