The ‘Comings & Goings’ column chronicles important life changes of Blade readers.

The Comings & Goings column is about sharing the professional successes of our community. We want to recognize those landing new jobs, new clients for their business, joining boards of organizations and other achievements. Please share your successes with us at [email protected].

Jeffrey Taylor

Congratulations to Jeff Taylor recently awarded the 2017 Top Individual Agent of the TTR Sotheby’s International Realty Downtown Brokerage. Taylor is a Realtor Associate with 14 years of real estate sales experience.

He began his real estate career in Texas, with Zane Anderson Real Estate in Bryan, Texas. After relocating to D.C., he said, “his passion for real estate grew, as did his love for the city, its architecture, and its people.” Taylor is known for his local expertise, strategic marketing efforts, and his commitment to achieving an unsurpassed level of service to his clients.

He has been featured in Washington Life, Capitol File, and the Washington Post for his historic home and condominium sales in Dupont Circle, Logan Circle, Columbia Heights, Shaw, LeDroit Park, and Bloomingdale, where he resides with his family.                                   

Congratulations also to Travis Painter, elected chair of Library of Congress Globe (LC GLOBE). LC GLOBE is an educational, recreational and cultural organization for LGBT employees in the Library of Congress. LC GLOBE promotes cognizance in areas that are of interest to LGBT employees while supporting positive working relationships among employees of all sexual orientations.

Painter said, “our goal for 2018 is to form a close relationship with the other LGBT organizations on the Hill and leverage our staff to effect the most positive change for our LGBT staff and members.” He is currently the Interpreting Services Program Manager at the Library of Congress. In that role he also serves as the library’s Director of Accessibility and provides agency-wide accessibility and disability sensitivity training for senior management and all new employees.

Painter was appointed by Mayor Muriel Bowser as a member of the Commission for Persons with Disabilities. He is a Nationally Certified Sign Language Interpreter, and a member of Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID). He’s a former president of Eastern Kentucky University’s American Sign Language Association. He received his bachelor’s in American Sign Language Interpreter Training from Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Ken.

Travis Painter

Congratulations also to Ben de Guzman, the new Community Outreach Relations Specialist for the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs. In this role, he will work to connect LGBTQ residents of the District of Columbia to city government agencies, services, and programs.

De Guzman recently served as one of the co-chairs of the Host Committee for the Task Force’s 2018 Creating Change Conference, the nation’s largest LGBT social justice conference.  He coordinated programming and services for LGBT elders, people with disabilities, and people of color for the conference’s 30th anniversary.

Prior to working in the Mayor’s Office he was National Managing Coordinator for the Diverse Elders Coalition, where he advocated for policies and programs that improved lives for aging people of color; American Indians and Alaska Natives and LGBT people. He coordinated local and national strategies to bring the voices of diverse constituencies to the 2015 White House Conference on Aging. He also served for almost 10 years as principal staff at the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance, where he managed the policy and programmatic work for NQAPIA and its federation of 40 Asian American, South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander LGBT groups around the country.

Ben de Guzman