Catalina Velásquez is the founder and principal of Consult Catalina, where she helps mission-driven organizations design governance, culture, and accountability that match their values. A transgender, refugee Colombian-Latina, she brings to consulting the same lens she brings to her scholarship: that how an organization is built, how it distributes power, money, and care, is where its politics actually live.

Catalina helped build some of the most influential progressive institutions of the last decade. She was a founding board member of Megaphone Strategies, helping create one of the most diverse PR firms in U.S. politics, and a founding board member and vice-chair of Our Revolution. She co-founded the Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project (QUIP) at United We Dream and has worked with End Rape on Campus, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, the AFL-CIO, the Trans Women of Color Collective, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, among others.

Catalina was the first transgender immigrant Latina appointed Commissioner for the D.C. Office of Latino Affairs (2013–2017). The 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign selected her for its LGBT policy team, and Rolling Stone named her one of "16 Young Americans Shaping the 2016 Election." Her honors include the D.C. Mayor's Office on Women's Policy and Initiatives Woman of Excellence Award and the Latino GLBT History Project's Advocacy Award.

Fluent in Spanish and English, Catalina is a political analyst, organizer, and feminist educator who thinks easily across disciplines. Her scholarship examines forced migration and refugee justice, solidarity across difference, the political economies of U.S.–Latin American relations, transgender and queer theory, and the technologies of surveillance, which she carries directly into her consulting practice through a decolonial feminist lens.

She holds a B.S. from Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and an M.A. in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies from the University of Washington, where she is expected to defend her dissertation in 2026, having been a doctoral candidate since August 2022.