Meet the Participants
Takiyah Nur Amin, MFA, PhD, is a scholar, strategist, and faculty developer whose work bridges Black performance scholarship, equity-centered institutional practice, and African diasporic intellectual traditions. Her research examines the cultural and historical dimensions of Black dance, centering movement as a repository of cultural memory and embodied knowledge. Her scholarship appears with Duke University Press, Routledge, Oxford University Press, and The Black Scholar. She is a founding executive board member of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance and a past Vice President for Membership of the Dance Studies Association. A two-time Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fellow and NEH Summer Institute fellow at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Amin is founder and CEO of Black Girl Brilliance, LLC, partnering with colleges and universities on faculty development and institutional change.
Dotun Ayobade (he, his, him) is an Associate Professor jointly appointed in Performance Studies and Black Studies at Northwestern University. He studies the embodied aspect of culture that agitate for community, justice, and activism in West Africa. He is equally invested in understanding how artists who are alert to issues of political economy mobilize aesthetic and everyday social performance to generate legibility and read against the grain. Ayobade wrote Queens of Afrobeat: Women, Play, and Fela Kuti’s Music Rebellion (2024, Indiana University Press), the first book-length study of the storied lives of the iconic collective of women artists who gave potency to the work of Fela Kuti, Nigeria’s famed musician and activist. Ayobade’s emerging research project explores the intersection of crude oil extractivism and embodiment across global Black geographies.
Dr. M. Aziz, PhD, is a Black, transmasc, Muslim community member, historical thinker, and physical de-escalation instructor. A grandchild of the Black Power, they believe we need a vast toolkit to get free, from gardening to martial arts to therapy. They love hoagies, their Ummi, and the Princess of R&B, Aaliyah. They are currently an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of Washington and affiliate faculty in the Departments of Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies and Dance. Aziz’s first book asks how martial arts contributed to Black Power organizing and shifting ideas about liberation, empire, and gender norms. In 2022, they received the Journal of African American History Award for creative and innovative research. Their future projects include work on Willi Ninja, voguing, and kung fu, and an article on the weaponization of the term “safety” against young college activists. Aziz teaches groundbreaking courses like “Self-Defense and (Auto)Biography” and “Martial Arts and Social Justice” as well as free community workshops. Because of this, they became the most junior faculty to win one of the university’s highest honors, its Distinguished Teaching Award, in 2024. Their work been published or featured in the Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and the Smithsonian’s Podcast, Sidedoor.
Mesi Bakari-Walton, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Afro-Diaspora Cultures at Howard University. Her research intersects Africana, Latin American, and Cultural Studies and examines how music, song, dance, language, and other cultural practices function as symbols of identity and tools of survival. She earned her PhD in African Studies at Howard University, focusing on Afro-Venezuelan cultural survivals, and conducted Fulbright research in Colombia on Afro-Colombian cultural traditions of the Atlantic Coast. Her publications include the chapter “Dance, Rhythm, and Ritual: Afro-Venezuelans in Resistance” and the peer-reviewed article “Afro-Venezuelan Cultural Survival: Invoking Ancestral Memory.” Bakari-Walton has taught and performed at the Venezuelan and Colombian embassies in the United States and at international institutions, organizations, and festivals. She also organizes cultural exchange tours throughout Latin America for youth and adults.
Jamal Batts (he/him) is a writer, curator, and Assistant Professor of Black Studies at Swarthmore College. His work considers the relation between Black contemporary art making, sexuality, and risk. Previously, he has served as a Stanford University IDEAL Provostial Fellow in the Department of Art and Art History, a Curator-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, and a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Scholar-in-Residence. His writing appears and is forthcoming in Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon (New Museum), Los Angeles Review of Books, b2o: boundary 2 online, Social Text, Open Space, ASAP/J, and SFMOMA’s website in conjunction with their Modern Cinema series. He is a member of the curatorial collective The Black Aesthetic who have programmed four seasons of experimental Black film and published three edited volumes.
Andie Berry is an assistant professor in the Department of Theater Arts at Brandeis University and has affiliations with the Departments of African and African American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. As a theater historian and playwright, her work highlights Black feminist thought, women’s writing and performance, twentieth- and twenty-first-century performance cultures, and experimental drama. She is currently at work on her first book manuscript, What the Body Cannot Hold: Performance Notes on Blackness and Speculation, about how and where theater and the speculative intersect as well as her next play, Hunting M—, which retells Medusa’s myth. Her work has appeared Theatre Survey and she won the 2018 Jane Chambers Student Playwriting Award.
Dr Melissa Blanco Borelli is a dance and performance studies scholar, choreographer, and cultural critic. She is Professor of Dance, Theatre and Performance Studies and the Director of the Dance Program at Northwestern University. Research andpublications move through and produce work that centers Blackness in Latin America, Black performance theory, critical theory, critical dance studies, academic performative writing, popular dance on screen, (Black) feminist (auto)ethnography, historiography, archives and archiving, and the digital humanities. She is the author of She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body (2015) and the recently published Aesthetics of Displacement: Movement, Archives, and Performance in Contemporary Colombia (2026) with University of Michigan Press.
David Sterling Brown, PhD is a passionate literary critic, pedagogue, editor, public speaker, and Associate Professor of English at Trinity College in Connecticut. He is the author of Shakespeare’s White Others (2023) and the forthcoming Shakespeare Under the Hood—both with Cambridge University Press and the former available as an audiobook narrated by Brown. A 2021 ACLS/Mellon Foundation Scholars and Society Fellowship awardee, Dr. Brown is a member of the Curatorial Team for Claudia Rankine’s The Racial Imaginary Institute; and he sits on the General Editorial Board for Shakespeare’s Sources, a fifteen-volume Arden Shakespeare/Bloomsbury series that rethinks Shakespeare source study. His work engages critical race studies, critical whiteness studies, performance studies, Black feminism, sound studies, sexuality, gender, digital humanities, and sociology. Dr. Brown also serves on the Shakespeare Survey and Shakespeare Bulletin editorial boards, on the American Shakespeare Center Board of Trustees, and on the Planning Committee for the 2027 #MeTooAcademia Conference. Additionally, he is co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of Humanities centered on race, intimacy, and sexual violence in early modern literature. Learn more about him at DavidSterlingBrown.com.
La Marr Jurelle Bruce, PhD is a fever dreamer, philosopher, cultural critic, and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Across his writing and teaching, Dr. Bruce is especially attentive to people who make art and culture under duress or in despair. Much of his work concerns B/black, queer, and mad expressive cultures and social worlds. Dr. Bruce’s research has been supported and honored by the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, the Stanford University Humanities Center, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College, among other organizations. His first book, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (Duke University Press 2021), earned the Modern Language Association’s Prize for a First Book and the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award. Now he’s in the thick of two projects. One is a study of—and an experiment in—convergences of love and madness. The other unfurls a critical theory, cultural history, aesthetic expression, and impassioned defense of black love outside.
Faedra Chatard Carpenter, PhD is the Maya Brin Professor of New Performance at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Carpenter is a theatre and performance studies scholar, professional dramaturg, cultural critic and award-winning teacher. Her book, Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance (University of Michigan Press), received Honorable Mentions for both ATDS’s John W. Frick Book Award and for ASTR’s Errol Hill Award. In terms of theatre practice, Dr. Carpenter has worked on over 70 projects, serving as a play development, production, and/or institutional dramaturg for an array of theatres and institutions such as Arena Stage, Mosaic Theatre, The Folger, Ford’s Theatre, and The Kennedy Center. Dr. Carpenter is currently working on her second book project, Crafting Consciousness, a study of creative texts, performance events, and public presentations. The book explores how the particularized employment of imagery, language, and communal narratives can facilitate and foster meanings—both intended and unintended.
Henry Castillo is a Colombian theatre maker, scholar, educator, and critic of culture whose work focuses on Afro-diasporic theatre and performance in Latin America and the Caribbean. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Theatre at Northwestern University. His research examines Black performance, racial formation, and cultural heritage while challenging Eurocentric approaches to theatre historiography. He is currently completing his first monograph, Racialized Bodies as Heritage (University of Michigan Press). Castillo began his artistic career with the Colombian avant-garde theatre collective Teatro Experimental de Cali (TEC), and his work bridges performance practice, cultural criticism, and community-based approaches to collective creation.
N. Fadeke Castor is an Associate Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Northeastern University and a Black Feminist ethnographer, African diaspora religious studies scholar of Trinidadian heritage. Their research and teaching interests in race, religion, and performance are inspired by the confluence of Black religious expressions and liberation struggles. Castor’s first book, Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifá in Trinidad (Duke 2017) won the Clifford Geertz Prize for best book in Anthropology of Religion. Their work can be found in Small Axe, Cultural Anthropology, Fieldwork in Religion, Tarka, The Black Scholar, Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, and the Journal of World Popular Music. In 2025 they were recipient of a Wenner-Gren Fellowship in Anthropology and Black Experiences at the School for Advanced Research (Santa Fe, New Mexico) in support of their next project on Afro-Indigenous spirituality, alternative ways of knowing, and the creation of otherwise spaces.
Renée Alexander Craft is a performance studies-trained Black feminist writer, scholar, educator, and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she holds appointments in Communication, Global Studies, and African, African American, and Diaspora Studies and directs the Southern Oral History Program. Her research explores how Black Diaspora communities use creativity and imagination as tools for liberation. For more than twenty-five years, her work has centered on the Congo carnival tradition of Portobelo, Panama, grounding her award-winning monograph, When the Devil Knocks, and the interactive archive Digital Portobelo. She is also co-editor of The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance. Her current multimodal project, Patacones, Paintbrushes, and Power, includes an exhibition, digital humanities project, and edited volume. Across her scholarship and creative practice, Craft is committed to public humanities, decolonial community-engaged research, and ethical archival stewardship.
Thomas F. DeFrantz, Professor at Northwestern University, directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, a humanities and creative research lab. He believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, proto-feminist, and queer-affirming. He convenes the Black Performance Theory working group and is founding director of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. DeFrantz contributed the concept and a voice-over for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016. Current creative projects include ...lonely ...; particles, fields, and the void; and dear alvin. Learn more at slippage.org.
Jordan Ealey (they/she) is a multidisciplinary Black feminist scholar-artist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. Their first book, Dissonant Dramaturgy: Black Women’s Music-Theatre and the Politics of Possibility, examines musical works by Black women as Black feminist intellectual production. Ealey’s scholarship appears in The Black Scholar, Global Black Thought, Girlhood Studies, Studies in Musical Theatre, and Theatre History Studies, and has been supported by ACLS, the New York Public Library, Harvard University, and the African American Intellectual History Society. They co-created and co-host Daughters of Lorraine, a Black feminist theatre podcast supported by HowlRound Theatre Commons. As a playwright, librettist, and dramaturg, Ealey’s works include SILHOUETTES, BLACK / FACE ON BUTTER, and THE SATURDAY NIGHTERS, commissioned by the University of Maryland.
Julius B. Fleming, Jr. is an Associate Professor of English at WashU. He earned a PhD in English and a graduate certificate in Africana studies from Penn in 2014. Specializing in Afro-diasporic literatures and cultures, he has particular interests in performance studies, black political culture, diaspora, and colonialism, especially where they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality.
Fleming is the author of Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, published by NYU Press in 2022. This book was awarded the 2024 College Language Association Book Prize as well as the 2022 Hooks National Book Award. It also received Honorable Mentions for the John W. Frick Award, the Joe A. Calloway Prize, and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Prize, and was a Finalist for the ATHE Outstanding Book Award, the George Freedley Memorial Award, and the ASTR Barnard Hewitt Award.
Fleming is currently at work on two new book projects: one that explores the relationship between the speculative and the new geographies of empire and colonialism and the other that examines the history of black nightlife.
James Ford currently teaches at Occidental College in English and Black Studies. He has published extensively on the Aesthetics of the Black Radical and Black Political Thought. He won the MLA's William Sanders Scarborough Prize for his book, Thinking Through Crisis: Depression-Era Black Literature, Theory and Politics. He is currently writing Phillis, the Black Swan: Disheveling the Origins of African American Literature.
Anita Gonzalez, PhD, is a Professor at Georgetown University whose work foregrounds underrepresented histories. In 2023, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A scholar of Performing Arts and Black Studies, Gonzalez has authored or edited five books, including Shipping Out: Race, Performance and Labor at Sea, Black Performance Theory, and Afro-Mexico: Dancing Between Myth and Reality. She is co-series editor of Cultural Histories of Theater and Performance for Bloomsbury Press. Gonzalez is also a producer, director, and librettist whose works include Mickey Dee and the Eclipse for Washington National Opera, Kumanana for GALA Hispanic Theatre, and Faces in the Flames, about photographer Thomas Askew. She is a member of the Beth Morrison Producers Lab, an American Opera Project fellow, and recipient of two OPERA America grants.
Imani Kai Johnson is an interdisciplinary scholar, specializing in Africanist aesthetics and diasporic expressive cultures, Hip Hop streetdances, and power. Her book, Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: the Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop (OUP 2023) was awarded the de la Torre Bueno® Prize a book published in the English language that advances the field by the Dance Studies Association. In it she uses the metaphor of “dark matter” (a physics concept describing non-luminous matter that comprises the majority of the universe), the book addresses histories of exclusion, marginalization, and the invisibilization of Hip Hop’s blackness, which fundamentally shapes the aesthetic sensibilities of breaking culture globally. Johnson also founded and is the Artistic Director of the Show & Prove Hip Hop Studies Conference Series, started in 2010.
Adanna Kai Jones (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Dance and Dance Studies in the Department of Theater and Dance at Bowdoin College. She received her Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and her BFA in Dance from Mason Gross School of the Arts—Rutgers University. Both her artistic and scholarly work remains rooted in the many dances of the Caribbean, paying particular attention to the multiple ways we roll our sweet waistlines! With regards to her own creative pursuits, she has choreographed dance-theater pieces that were not only based on her research but were also used as tools for generating more research questions. As a scholar, her research and writings call attention to the layered ways the dancing Caribbean body mitigates one’s relationship to both social and political systems of power. Lastly, as an educator and member of the Un/Commoning Pedagogies Collective, she remains committed to anti-racist pedagogic praxes and works to tackle, endure, unravel, and combat the pangs of white supremacy within academia and beyond.
T. Shacon Jones II, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Performing Arts for Social Justice in the Department of Theater and Dance at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. An artist-scholar-activist, archivist, intimacy professional, and ethnographer in Critical Black Male Studies, he is developing his first book, Stank Tenderness: Black Men, Radical Pleasure, & Critical Redress, on the Black male body in ecstasy. A first-generation college graduate and emancipated former foster youth, Jones earned his PhD in Performance Studies from Stanford University, an MFA in Theatre Management and Producing from Columbia University, and a BA from Morehouse College. His career bridges academy and community practice, including work with New York Live Arts and New Haven Public Schools. He remains engaged in foster youth advocacy, cannabis justice reform, reparations, and intimacy harm-reduction initiatives.
Christina Knight, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Art History and Mellon Assistant Professor of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. She received her PhD from Harvard University in African American Studies, with a primary field in the History of Art. Before joining Rutgers, she was the founding director and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Haverford College, a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at Bowdoin College, and a Ford Foundation Diversity Fellow. Knight’s work examines connections between embodied practices and identity, the relationship between race and the visual field, and the queer imaginary. She is currently completing The Ship That is the Body: Performance, Spectatorship, and the Blackness of Physics, a book manuscript under contract with Duke University Press.
Mario LaMothe is Assistant Professor of Black Studies and Anthropology at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is the author of Vodou Rich: Haiti, Dancemakers, and Dedoublaj (University of Illinois Press, 2026). His research explores Haitian Vodou artistry, embodied pedagogies of Afro-Caribbean religious rituals, and the intersections of spectatorship, queerness, and social justice across Black hemispheric American sites. His writing has appeared in peer-reviewed and commercial publications, including e-misfèrica, Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, L’imparfaite, The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance, Scalawag, Women & Performance, and the Journal of Haitian Studies. LaMothe is an LGBTQI+ rights advocate in Haiti and a performance artist.
Khalid Y. Long, PhD, is Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts and Professor of Theatre Arts at Howard University. A cultural historian, dramaturg, and director, his scholarship examines African American and Black diasporic theatre and performance through Black feminist/womanist thought, queer studies, and performance studies. His books include Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance: Acts of Rebellion, Activism, and Solidarity and August Wilson in Context. His forthcoming monograph, An Architect of Black Feminist Theatre: Glenda Dickerson, Transnational Feminism, and The Kitchen Prayer Series, is under contract with the University of Iowa Press. Long’s scholarship appears in Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, among other publications. He is President of the August Wilson Society.
Vanessa Damilola Macaulay is a British artist-scholar whose research is embedded in the practical and intellectual work of Black feminism. An Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute, she is currently based in Chicago. Her scholarship and practice together foreground Black feminist theory as both a mode of critique and a method of making. Macaulay’s artistic practice moves between autobiographical traces and archival excavation, using performance as both a method of inquiry and a site of encounter. Macaulay's work has been presented at, among other venues, The Getty (Los Angeles), International Museum of Surgical Science (Chicago), Mütter Museum (Philadelphia) the Momentary (Arkansas), Buzzcut (Scotland), and Driftwood Studios (South Africa), The Yard (London).
Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr. is the Frederick Douglass Professor and Founding Chair of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. A scholar, writer, artist, and cultural critic, his work moves across Black studies, performance studies, queer studies, and cultural criticism, attending especially to the complex social and aesthetic lives of Black people. McCune is the author of the award-winning book, Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing (University of Chicago Press, 2014), an interdisciplinary study of Black queer life, masculinity, performance, and the politics of visibility. His forthcoming book, Disobedient Reading: Ways of Seeing Black (Univeristy of California Press, Fall 2027) is a study of Black cultural life, performance, and the politics of seeing. Developing what he calls a “Black queer optic,” the book explores how practices of looking, reading, and embodied engagement can produce different ways of knowing Black life. Trained in performance, McCune has worked as an actor, playwright, and dramaturg. He is also completing Pillar Talk, a collection of poetry rooted in coming of age in Chicago.
Dr. Webster McDonald is a Jamaican-born Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Kansas, where he teaches courses in postcolonial theory, race and performance, acting, dance and culture, and movement. He was previously a Postdoctoral Associate in Northwestern University’s Slippage Lab. McDonald is co-editor, with Thomas F. DeFrantz, of Black Social Dance: Embodied Geographies of Freedom and the forthcoming Dancing a Black Social: Critical Positions of Place, and co-editor, with Ben Spatz, of the forthcoming Poetics for Planetary Praxis: Toward New Genres of Being and Knowledge Production. His forthcoming manuscript, Archival Weight: Sexuality, Citizenship and the Declivity of Blackqueer Jamaican Life, examines how law, sexuality, citizenship, and colonial legacies shape Black queer Jamaican life. His essays and book chapters have appeared in Caribbean Studies, Caribbean Men in the Arts, Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. A director, choreographer, and decolonial monodramatist, McDonald’s research and creative practice spans Caribbean literary criticism, Black queer theory, performance studies, and performance as research.
Koritha Mitchell is a literary historian and cultural critic who coined the term “know-your-place aggression” to emphasize that marginalized groups are attacked for succeeding rather than for wrongdoing. She is the author of Living with Lynching (2011) and From Slave Cabins to the White House (2020), and editor of Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Mitchell has published in Time, The Washington Post, Black Perspectives, CNN, MSNBC, and other outlets. In 2023, the Women’s Media Center honored her with a Progressive Women’s Voices IMPACT Award for championing women and LGBT+ communities in the public sphere. After 18 years at Ohio State University, Mitchell now teaches at Boston University and is working on a memoir about being childfree.
Raquel Monroe, PhD, is dean of the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard University and a Black performance theory scholar and performance artist. Before joining Howard, she served as Associate Dean of Graduate Education and Academic Affairs and Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. Monroe’s research and artistic practice engage African diasporic aesthetics and Black feminist performance praxis, with a focus on performance as a vehicle for social change. She has presented site-responsive work internationally with the Propelled Animals collective. Her academic leadership emphasizes strategic growth, equity-driven hiring, interdisciplinary collaboration, and mentorship. At UT Austin, she launched grant initiatives supporting university-community partnerships and oversaw the Expanding Approaches in American Arts initiative, recruiting six faculty across African, Asian, Indigenous, and Latinx diasporas.
Gayle Murchison is Associate Professor of Music at William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA, in the United States. Her most recent publications include book chapters on Nadia Boulanger in the US, music in Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Woman, and Mary Lou Williams’s short-lived late 1940s Girl Stars all-female jazz ensemble. She is the author of The American Musical Stravinsky: The Style and Aesthetic of Copland’s New American Music, the Early Works, 1921-1938 (The University of Michigan Press, 2012). She has also published on William Grant Still and other African American composers and musicians. Her research interests focus on 20th century music and African American and African disaporic music, ranging from Mary Lou Williams, William Grant Still, and the music of social and cultural movements (such as the Harlem Renaissance and Civil Rights Movements, and, the music of Zap Mama and Afro-European studies). She served as editor of Black Music Research Journal 2014-2019. She currently serves as one of the co-editors of Jazz Perspectives. In 2024 she was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of York where she undertook research on the quadrumvirate of early 1950s-American ex-pat Mary Lou Williams and British Black women Cleo Laine, Shirley Bassey, and Winifred Atwell. She is currently working on two book projects: “Mary Lou Williams in Europe, 1952-1954” and “Marie Daulne’s Ancestry in Progress: Zap Mama Sounding Post-colonial Afropean Identities.” She has been awarded a British Library 2026–27 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellowship and will be conducting research in London summer 2026. In July she will present latest research paper The Beyoncé Mass (2018) Quod libet: Womanist/Feminist Empowerment and Black Liberation Theology of Becoming” at the Black Sacred Arts Conference co-hosted by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and the University of Ghana, Legon in Accra in July 22–24, 2026.
RaShelle R. Peck (she/hers) is an associate professor in the Ethnic and Race Studies department at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. Her book, Nairobi Hip Hop Flow: Diasporic Blackness and Embodied Performance in the Underground (UC Press, 2025), is an interdisciplinary study that combines ethnography, archival work, political history, and music and performance analysis to account for the innovations within Nairobi’s rap culture. Her research interests include Kenyan and US popular culture, Afrofuturism and Black futurity, Black performance theory, music studies, and gender and sexuality studies. She has published in Lateral, Research in African Literatures, African Studies Review, and the Feminist Wire. Her research has been supported by CUNY’s Black, Race and Ethnic Studies Initiative (BRESI).
Gabriel Peoples is an associate professor of African American Studies and ’22-'23 Ford postdoctoral fellow, whose research is located at the nexus of performance, gender, and Africana studies. In his 2025 book featured in the University of Illinois' esteemed New Black Studies series, Goin’ Viral: Uncontrollable Black Performance, he explores how Black people and their representations go viral and what happens when they do, from the 18th century to the present. Not only does derogatory Blackness become commonplace as a result, but challenges to that derogation and an insistent Blackness operate to deepen understandings of Black performance in and through media. In his next project, It’s About the Feelin’: Black Sonic Placemaking and Imagination, he examines how music summons communal ecstasy in everyday life and popular culture, and its interplay with lives marked by Blackness as an offering about the seriousness of play. Using observations of popular and visual culture and performance ethnography, he asks different questions about Black aliveness that do not originate with death. Beyond academia, he spends his spare hours traveling the world, DJing, and writing poems.
Amanda Reid is an Assistant Professor and Director of Dance in Yale's Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies Department. She is a historian who writes and teaches about queer of color critique, West Indian migration, and post-colonial Caribbean black radicalism. Her current manuscript project, Smaddification: Dance and Decolonization in Jamaica, explores maximalist queer diaspora aesthetics in Jamaican concert dance to theorize West Indian regional visions of blackness, bodily freedom, and cultural autonomy. Her writing can be found in Theatre Journal, Women & Performance, The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies (OUP, 2026) and Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings, 2nd ed. (OUP, forthcoming). Prior to coming to Yale, Amanda was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford Humanities Center (2020-2022). She received her PhD from the Department of History at the University of Michigan.
Shoniqua Roach, PhD, is a queer Black feminist writer and Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. Her peer-reviewed work appears in American Quarterly, boundary 2, differences, Feminist Theory, Signs, and The Black Scholar, where she is newly appointed Associate Editor. Her forthcoming book, Black Dwelling: Home-Making and Erotic Freedom, examines Black domestic spaces as sites of imperial state invasion and Black feminist enactments of erotic freedom. Roach has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Studies Association, and the Ford Foundation. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and is a semi-professional pole dancer and sensual movement artist. Roach co-curates The Black Femme Makerspace, an annual residency for multidisciplinary artists.
Roxy Regine Theobald, PhD is an arts practice researcher and an established dance educator, creator, visual artist currently based in Ireland. She is a lecturer in contemporary dance and somatic studies at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick. Her work spans dance ethnography, somatic creativity and screen dance projects. Dr Theobald explores how Francophone African genealogies and bodily memory trauma can be uncovered, processed, and expressed through structured movement and collaboration. She investigates how ancestral memory, history, and personal identity are stored within the body and expressed through contemporary choreography, particularly focusing on the perspectives of the Black Feminist performance. Through her innovative 'Inner Lines' practice-as-research framework, Theobald uses dance ethnography to examine the spine and body memory as a central somatic axis. She was a 2022 recipient of the prestigious Government of Ireland Irish Research Council award. Her acclaimed practice-as-research dance film, Inner/Lines...Empowering Embodied Ancestral Voices (2024), earned recognition in Dance Magazine New York.
Cathy Thomas is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing and Director of the UCSB Creative Critical Center. A creative-critical scholar of Caribbean diaspora writing and culture, she focuses on the “Black Fantastic” and explores decolonial feminist play and resistance across comics, cosplay, Carnival, science, screen, stage, objects, and performance. Her projects include a monograph, Caribbean Futurist fiction, a collaborative trade book on women in Caribbean carnival culture, and two comic books. Her writing has appeared in Feminist Media Histories, Obsidian, Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, and Teaching, Reading, and Theorizing Caribbean Texts. Thomas is part of the Autonomous Futures collective, which uses ethnofuturisms to reimagine relationships to emerging technologies. She is also co-developing the human-centered AI platform Contrapuntal.ai and designing the experimental installation “Echolocating the Caribbean Diaspora.”
Luke Williams is a scholar, artist, organizer, and critic of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black performance and visual cultures. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin. In 2024, he earned his PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. His written work includes Blood, Sweat, and Time: Emerging Perspectives on Mildred Howard and Adrian Burrell (2024), published by SmingSming Books, as well as several scholarly and public-facing articles. His current manuscript examines how the value of Black art has changed in the market over the last decade.
Isaiah Matthew Wooden, PhD, is an award-winning scholar-artist, writer, and Associate Professor of Theater at Swarthmore College. He is the author of Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture, which was a finalist for the 2026 ATHE Outstanding Book Award. He is also the co-editor of August Wilson in Context, Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration, and “Manifestos for Black Theatre, Then and Now,” a special section of Theatre History Studies. Wooden has contributed more than sixty articles, essays, and reviews on contemporary art, drama, and performance to scholarly and popular publications. His research has received such honors as the ACLS Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, the American Society for Theatre Research’s Errol Hill Award, and the Black Theatre Network’s S. Randolph Edmonds Award, among others. As a director and dramaturg, Wooden has collaborated on projects in venues ranging from the Uganda National Theatre to the Kennedy Center.