[8][6] While at Columbia University, she served on the President's Council on Student Affairs amidst a Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures Departmental Scandal.
[10] Along with Critical Resistance, Tourmaline organized a campaign with low income LGBTGNC that prevented the NYC Department of Corrections from building a $375 million jail in the Bronx.
[14] Tourmaline was featured in Brave Spaces: Perspectives on Faith and LGBT Justice (2015), which was produced by Marc Smolowitz and screened as a Human Rights Campaign event.
[citation needed] In 2017, she edited the book Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility,[15] with co-editors Eric A. Stanley and Johanna Burton.
[18] For this film she gathered oral histories form LGBTQ New Yorkers on the challenges faced accessing affordable housing, medical care, and social services.
Tourmaline and collaborator Sasha Wortzel were applying for a grant for financial assistance to release their short film, Happy Birthday, Marsha!.
[33][34][35] Also in 2017, Tourmaline’s work was featured at the New Museum in New York in an exhibition titled Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon Archived April 29, 2020, at the Wayback Machine.
[40] In Summer Azure, Tourmaline herself is the subject and she's seen up in the blue sky, wearing white clothing in solidarity with Black trans lives.
[42] In all of the photos, Summer Azure, Coral Hairstreak, Sleepy Orange Sulphur, Swallowtail, and Morning Cloak, Tourmaline looks directly at the camera.
In 2021, The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired two works by the artist, including Summer Azure, for display in Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room.
One site being Nanny Goat Hill, an outcrop of Seneca Village, the autonomous community where Black and Irish people lived and stayed together between 1825 and 1827.
Nanny Goat Hill Pleasure Gardens is a counter-monument that celebrates and amplifies the historic existence of Black space beyond ownership or sovereignty.