Bimbola Akinbola is Chicago-based artist and scholar. Working at the intersection of African diaspora studies, performance, visual culture, and postcolonial theory, Dr. Akinbola’s scholarly work is concerned with kinship and belonging, gender performance, and affect in the African diaspora.

Dr. Akinbola is currently working on her first book manuscript, which examines disbelonging and diasporic homemaking in the creative work of contemporary Nigerian diasporic women artists. Her essays have also been published in Text and Performance Quarterly and Women Studies Quarterly.

In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Akinbola is a practicing visual and performance artist who has shown work at venues such as Center on Halsted, The Riverside Arts Center, Compound Yellow, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

She received her PhD in 2018 from the University of Maryland, College Park and was Northwestern’s 2018-2020 Black Performing Arts Post-Doctoral Fellow.

Dotun Ayobade (he, his, him) holds a joint appointment as an Assistant Professor in Performance Studies and African American Studies. He studies how embodied forms of popular culture shape the meaning of community, justice, and activism in late twentieth century West Africa. Ayobade attends to how West Africans activate aesthetic and everyday social performance to shape their lived realities, forge belonging, and declare being within the political economy of contemporary African societies. His work considers the function of embodiment in and across a range of cultural forms—i.e., dance, theatre, sound, material culture, performance art and photography—alongside the multiple significations of the aestheticized body in contemporary Nigeria: as an archive of collective desires and underexplored histories, as a fodder for subversive worldmaking, and as a space for rearticulating meaning and possibility between Africa and the African diaspora. His work sits at the intersections of Dance and Performance Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Gender Studies, and Popular Cultural and Postcolonial Studies.

M. Aziz (Uh-Zeez), they/them/theirs pronouns, is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies in the Department of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington. Their first book asks how folks who practiced unarmed self-defense and martial arts contributed to Black Power organizing and shifting ideas about liberation, abolition, and gender norms. It also traces how this was facilitated by Cold War militarism. They organized the 2022 Symposium, "Histories of Healing: An Africana Symposium on Movement and Wellness," at Pennsylvania State University.  In the Fall of 2022, they received the V.P. Franklin Legacy Journal of African American History Award from the Association for the Study of African American Life for their article, “They Punched Black: Martial Arts, Black Arts, and Sports in the Urban North and West.”’ As a curator, their work was showcased in the 2017-2018 exhibit, “Black Power!, ” at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. And as a scholar activist, Aziz has written for the Washington Post and regularly teaches radically inclusive self-defense classes.

Professor and Associate Chair of African and African American Studies
Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Affiliate Faculty, Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity (CRE2) and the Department of Performing Arts.
 

Marlon M. Bailey is a Black queer theorist and critical/performance ethnographer who studies Black LGBTQ cultural formations, sexual health, and HIV/AIDS prevention. He has served as the Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor in Africana Studies at Carleton College; the Distinguished Weinberg Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University, and a Visiting Professor at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS) in the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Marlon is a member of the committee that co-authored the award-winning report, Understanding the Well-Being of LGBTQ+ Populations, published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). This report won the 2021 Achievement Award from The Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA).

Dr. Stephanie Leigh Batiste is a Professor of Black Studies and English at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she is also Affiliate Professor in the Departments of Theater and Dance and Comparative Literature. She is co-editor of the NYU Press Book Series Performance and American Cultures.

Dr. Batiste’s research areas include Race and Racism, Performance Studies, African American Literature and Culture, American Studies, Cultural Studies, and U.S. History. Her interdisciplinary work has appeared in Text & Performance Quarterly, The Black Scholar, The New Centennial Review, International Journal of Screen Dance, The Journal of Haitian Studies as well as multiple collections and anthologies.

Dr. Batiste’s first book, Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression Era African American Performance (Duke University Press, 2011) won the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize and honorable mention for the Association for Theater in Higher Education Book Award.

Professor Batiste is also a creative writer, performer, and supporter of the arts. She has written three plays: Stacks of Obits, Young Love Found and Lost: Six Poems in a Circle, and Blue Gold & Butterflies. Her solo show Stacks of Obits about street murder in Los Angeles has been performed nationally and internationally.

Dr Blanco Borelli is Associate Professor in the Theatre Department where she is the Director of the Dance Program. She also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Performance Studies. Her first BPT was back in 2002 as a first year graduate student. What an honor to still be here sharing space, breath and intellect with you all.

Seika Boye is a writer, scholar, curator, and artist whose practices revolve around dance, movement, Blackness, archives and museums, and embodied pedagogies. She is an Assistant Professor and Founder/Director of the Institute for Dance Studies at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto.

Seika curated the archival and contemporary art exhibition It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1970 and Now (2018) and co-curated Into the Light: Eugenics and Education in Southern Ontario (2019). She has worked as a movement dramaturg with artists including Natasha Powell/Holla Jazz, taisha paggett, Syreeta Hector, Mix Mix Dance Collective, Deanna Bowen, Heidi Struass/adelheid dance, and Djanet Sears. 

Her publications include writing for Dance Chronicle, Canadian Theatre Review, alt.theatre, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, Performance Matters, Dance Collection Danse Magazine and The Dance Current. From 2004-2010 Seika worked in various archival and editorial capacities at Dance Collection Danse Archives and Publisher. Seika is the co-editor/contributor with Thomas F DeFrantz, of Configurations in Motion: Performance Curation and Communities of Colour, 3rd Edition (2017). She is an Associate Editor for Canadian Theatre Research.

Seika was an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2018), Toronto District School Board's African Heritage Educators’ Network Arts Honoree (2019) and a 2020 recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Heritage Trust Award (co-curator, Into the Light). She is the inaugural recipient of Dance Studies Association Dance in the Public Sphere Award (2021).

I am a dancer, writer, wanderer, wonderer, curious about people who use art to collaborate in healing and recreating worlds. At UWB, I teach courses in cultural politics, self-care, dance and performance art as research practice. I collaborate with Professor Anida Yoeu Ali to produce campus and regional arts events through the IAS research group Critical Acts: Socially Engaged Performance, including our Visiting Artist Residency, Alive Performance Festival and Imagine Student Showcase. My book Black Power of Hip Hop Dance: On Kinethic Politics mixes dance ethnography and oral history to tell stories of streetdances created by youth living in Funk and Disco era California, whose everyday artistry helped set foundations for global contemporary hip hop dance. I invented the word ‘kinethic’ to describe how their collective movement practices reorient dancers toward other ways of sensing, being and belonging in ethical relation.

Mark Broomfield (PhD, MFA), Associate Professor of English and Founding Director of Performance as Social Change at SUNY Geneseo, is an award-winning scholar and artist with numerous publications in the areas of race, gender, sexuality, dance performance and ethnography. Broomfield has performed nationally and internationally, and danced with the repertory company Cleo Parker Robinson Dance, performing in leading works by some of the most diverse and recognized African American choreographers in the American modern dance tradition. An innovative educator and facilitator, Broomfield has lectured, choreographed, and directed widely across the U.S.

N. Fadeke Castor (she/they) is a Black Feminist ethnographer and African diaspora studies scholar, with research and teaching interests in religion, race, performance and the intersectional politics of decolonization. As a Yorùbá Ifá initiate of Trinidadian heritage they are inspired by African spiritual engagements with Black liberation imaginaries and the Black radical tradition. She is the author of Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifá in Trinidad (Duke University Press, 2017; Clifford Geertz Prize, 2018), which argued that centering the Ifá/Orisha religion in the Black radical tradition and Trinidad’s Black Power revolution illuminates decolonization practices and performances in the post-colonial Caribbean. Their writings can be found in Cultural Anthropology, Fieldwork in Religion, Tarka, and The Black Scholar. Her current research focuses on an exploration of how Black spiritual praxis draws from non-Christian religious and spiritual ontologies and epistemologies to shift our centers of being and ways of knowing towards collective care, healing, and social transformation. As part of this larger project Digital Ancestral Altars: Remembrances of Trinidad Ifá/Orisha Elders (funded by a Community Stories grant from The Crossroads Project, Princeton University) will create a digital multi-modal repository and archive to commemorate Trinidad’s ancestral Ifá/Orisha elders. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Northeastern University and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.

As an artist and scholar, Grisha Coleman works in areas of movement, digital media, and performance that engage creative forms in choreography, music composition, and human-centered computer interaction. Her research explores relationships among physiological, technological, and ecological systems and human movement, our machines, and the places we inhabit. She is an associate professor of movement, computation, and digital media in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University, with affiliations in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre, the Design School, and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society.

Renée Alexander Craft is a performance studies trained Black feminist writer, scholar, and educator. She is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a joint appointment in the Department of Communication and Curriculum in Global Studies. She also serves as Director of Research for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Student Learning to Advance Truth and Equity (SLATE) program, which is housed in the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Research in Black Cultures and Histories.
Broadly, Alexander Craft’s research and teaching examine the relationship among sociohistorical constructions of Blackness, Black cultural performance, and discourses of Black inclusion and exclusion within a hemispheric American framework. She is particularly interested in the ways Black Diaspora communities use creativity and imagination as tools for liberation. For over twenty years, Alexander Craft’s research and creative projects have centered on an Afro-Latin community located in the small coastal town of Portobelo, Panama who call themselves and their carnival performance tradition “Congo.” She is the author of When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in 20th Century Panama and a digital humanities project titled Digital Portobelo: Art + Scholarship + Cultural Preservation (digitalportobelo.org). She also collaborated with Kathy A. Perkins, Sandra L. Richards, and Thomas F. DeFrantz to co-edited The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance.

Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology; the group explores emerging technology in live performance applications. 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.

Creative Projects include Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty commissioned by the Theater Offensive of Boston and the Flynn Center for the Arts; fastDANCEpast, created for the Detroit Institute for the Arts; reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW commissioned by the Nasher Museum in response to the work of Kara Walker, January, 2017.

Books: Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance (with Kathy Perkins, Sandra Richards, and Renee Alexander Craft, 2018), Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion (with Philipa Rothfield, 2016), Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings (with Anita Gonzalez, 2014), Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (2002), and Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004).

Margit Edwards, a Doctoral candidate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY, her research interests include 20th & 21st century Africana theatre and performance, theories of coloniality/modernity, and transcultural African dance dramaturgy. She has been a Fellow with the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and Caribbean (IRADAC) and a recipient of the Dean K. Harrison Fellowship. She currently teaches in the Department of Communication and Theater Arts at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and has taught at several other CUNY campuses, including City College of New York and Baruch College. Ms. Edwards recently produced roundtables and Artist Talks, called Africana Dance Dramaturgies: How do we represent? with choreographers and dramaturgs from West Africa, the US and the Caribbean at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. In addition, Ms. Edwards has participated in discussions on the Black Archive with the Institute on Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC), black dance archival practices at Gibney Dance Studio: Long Table Discussion series, and post show discussions, with 651Arts, Inc. Ms. Edwards artistic life includes being a founding member of Viver Brasil Dance Company (Los Angeles), Five Moon Theatre (NYC), and most recently movement choreographer for ALAT – A Laboratory for Actor Training (NYC).  Recent publication: “African Performance in the Feast of St. Francis Xavier in 17th century Luanda, Angola” in The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance (2018).

Ayana Omilade Flewellen (they/she) is a Black Feminist, an archaeologist, an artist scholar and a storyteller. Flewellen is the co-founder and current President of the Society of Black Archaeologists and sits on the Board of Diving With A Purpose. They were selected for the inaugural 2021-2023 cohort Called By Water, directed by Sharon Bridgforth and Omi Oshun Jones, funded by Solidaire Networks’ Black Liberation Pooled Fund. In 2022 Ayana joined Stanford University’s Department of Anthropology as an Assistant Professor. Her research and teaching interests are shaped by and speak to Black Feminist Theory, historical archaeology, maritime heritage conservation, public and community-engaged archaeology, processes of identity formations, memory, and representations of slavery.

Anita Gonzalez (Ph.D.) is a professor of performing arts and African American studies at Georgetown University and a co-Founder of their Racial Justice Institute. She was recently Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and a Professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan where she promoted interdisciplinary and intercultural performance initiatives. Her edited and authored books are Performance, Dance and Political Economy (Bloomsbury), Black Performance Theory (Duke), Afro-Mexico: Dancing Between Myth and Reality (U-Texas Press), and Jarocho’s Soul (Rowan Littlefield). Her essays about multi-cultural and international performance appear in several edited collections including Black Acting Methods (Luckett), The Community Performance Reader (Kuppers), Festive Devils (Riggio, Segura, and Vignola) and the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre (George-Graves, 2015). She has published articles in the Radical History Review, Modern Drama, Performance Research International, and Dance Research Journal. She has completed three Senior Scholar Fulbright grants and been a resident artist/scholar at Rockefeller’s Bellagio Center in Italy, and the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas. She was a Humanities Center Fellow at the University of Michigan during the 2017/18 academic year and is a recent recipient of the Shirley Verrett Award for outstanding teaching of performance.

George-Graves’ work is situated at the intersections of African American studies, critical gender studies, performance studies, theatre history, and dance history. She is the author of The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theater, 1900-1940 and Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of Dance Theater, Community Engagement and Working it Out as well as numerous articles on African American performance. She is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, a collection of border-crossing scholarship on embodiment and theatricality. She has also written on primitivity, ragtime dance, tap dance legend Jeni LeGon, identity politics and performance, competition, social change, early African American theatre and the future of performance in the academy. She has given talks, led community engagement projects, and has served on many boards and committees. She is a past-president of the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD).

Elena H. Guzman is an Afro-Puerto Rican scholar, educator, and filmmaker. She is currently an Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. Her films include Bronx Lives (2014) and Smile4Kime (2023). She is co-founder of Ethnocine Collective and producer of Bad Feminists Making Films.

E. Patrick Johnson has published widely in the areas of race, class, gender, sexuality, and performance. He is the founder and director of the Black Arts Initiative at Northwestern. He is also a Project& artist, a nonprofit arts organization engaged in art for social change and impact. Johnson is a prolific performer and scholar, and an inspiring teacher, whose research and artistry has greatly impacted African American studies, performance studies, and sexuality studies.

He is the author of two award-winning books, Appropriating Blackness:  Performance and the Politics of Authenticity, and Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History. He is the editor of Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis by Dwight Conquergood (Michigan UP, 2013) and co-editor (with Mae G. Henderson) of Black Queer Studies—A Critical Anthology and (with Ramon Rivera-Servera) of solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews, and essays and Blacktino Queer Performance (Duke UP, forthcoming). He is currently at work on the companion text to Sweet Tea, entitled, Honeypot: Southern Black Women Who Love Women and an edited collection of new writings in black queer studies tentatively titled, No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies.

Dr. Imani Kai Johnson is an interdisciplinary scholar, specializing in the African diaspora, global popular culture, and Hip Hop. She was born and raised in Northern California, but comes to UC Riverside from her adopted home in Brooklyn New York. She has attended UC Berkeley (BA), New York University (MA), and the University of Southern California (Ph.D.) where she received her doctorate in American Studies & Ethnicity. Dr. Johnson’s work explores African diasporic ritual cultures, popular cultures, representations of race, and negotiations of racial, gender, and national differences.

Adanna Kai Jones (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Dance in the Theater and Dance Dept 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. She has performed in professional dance companies based in NYC and New Jersey, including the Julia Ritter Performance Group and Souloworks with Andrea E. Woods.

As a scholar, her research generally focuses on Caribbean dance and identity politics within the Diaspora, paying particular focus to Trini-styled Carnivals and the rolling hip dance known as winin’. Nicknamed the “Doctor of Winin’,” 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. For example, she choreographed “Wine & Tales” in Port of Spain, Trinidad, which was presented by New Waves! 2015 and the Dancing While Black Performance Lab. And every summer, from 2016 to 2018, she performed new works in New York City with the support of Field Studies, a creative development lab designed for emerging artist/scholars. Upon moving to Maine, she brought her research on the Trinidadian Carnival and intimacy onto the stage with her piece “Navigating the Borders of Silence” as part of the Maine Moves performance series. ( It is important to note that each performance remained rooted in her ethnographic fieldwork.) 

Lastly, as an educator, she remains committed to anti-racist pedagogic praxes. In addition to being a member of the Un/Commoning Pedagogies Collective, she is a current Steering Committee Member of the Coalition of Diasporan Scholars Moving. Both organizations aim to tackle, endure, unravel, and combat the pangs of white supremacy within academia and beyond.

Sharrell D. Luckett is Taft Distinguished Professor of Drama and Performance Studies and Director of the Weinberger Center for Drama and Playwriting at the University of Cincinnati. She is also Executive Director of the Black Acting Methods Studio.

Christina Knight is Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Haverford College. Before joining the Haverford faculty, she was a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at Bowdoin College as well as a Ford Foundation Diversity Fellow. Knight’s work examines the connection between embodied practices and identity, the relationship between race and the visual field, and the queer imaginary. She is currently completing a book manuscript that focuses on theories of time in representations of the Middle Passage in contemporary American visual art and performance. Knight is also at work on a new project that examines the influences of drag culture on contemporary black art. Additionally, she is the director of knightworks dance theater, which she co-founded with her sister in 2013.

Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., PhD, is the author of the award-winning book Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing (University of Chicago Press, 2014). He is the co-editor of the Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital (University of Illinois Press, 2019). He is presently completing two book projects, Disobedient Reading: An Experiment in Seeing Black (University of California Press), and the other on the“wildness" of Kanye West titled, On Kanye. He has published in a variety of journals and also serves on the editorial board of numerous journals. He is the co-editor of the University of California Press’s New Sexual Worlds book series. For his work at the intersections, of race gender, and sexuality, McCune has been featured on Left of Black, Sirius XM's Joe Madison Show, HuffPost Live, NPR, Pitchfork and as a guest expert on Bill Nye Saves The World. In July 2021, he assumed the role as the Director of the Frederick Douglass Institute of African and African American Studies.

Vanessa is an artist scholar, researcher and Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Performance. Vanessa's research specialises in Black feminist performance practices in the UK and US from the 1980s to the current day. Her research uses both practice-based and written approaches to challenge the imbalances of intersectional identities, speaking to contemporary struggles and anxieties about the performing Black body.

Christopher-Rasheem Mcmillan is an assistant professor of dance theory and practice and of gender, women’s and sexuality studies at the University of Iowa. McMillan earned a BA from Hampshire College, an MFA in experimental choreography from the Laban Conservatoire, London and a PhD in theology and religious studies from King’s College London. In 2019, he was awarded the Collegiate Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa. In 2020, McMillan was appointed a fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music in Theology and the Arts, and he was named a Resident Fellow at New York University’s Center for Ballet and the Arts in 2021. Currently, he is completing a residency at the Center for Afrofuturist Studies.

McMillan’s performance works have been featured at venues such as the Bates Dance Festival of Bates College, Providence International Arts Festival (PVD), the Dance Complex and Green Street Studios in Cambridge, Massachusetts as well as in performance platforms such as the participatory event Beyond Text, London (2011). He was a Five College Fellow for the 2013–2014 academic year and a Grant Wood Fellow for the 2016–2017 academic year. Mcmillan has been a guest artist at colleges and universities including Reed College, Amherst College, Middlebury College, Franklin and Roger Williams University. He has performed and collaborated with artist such as T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, Wendy Woodson, Netta Yerusalem, Cathy Nicoli and Jhonathan Gonzalez. His writing has appeared in multiple journals, including The Journal of Dance, Movement & Spiritualities, Liminalities and Contact Quarterly.

Dr. Moriah has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at CUNY, Grinnell College and Queen’s University. Their teaching and research focus on Her research interests include Sound Studies and black feminist performance, particularly the circulation of African American performance within the black diaspora and its influence on the formation of national identity. She is a Colored Conventions Project Teaching Partner. She is currently at work on a monograph entitled Dark Stars of the Evening: African Americans in Berlin, 1890-1945. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and the Harry Ransom Center.

Gabriel Peoples is an assistant professor of Gender Studies whose research is located at the nexus of performance, gender, and Africana studies. As a Ford Postdoctoral Fellow, he is completing his book manuscript, Goin’ Viral: Uncontrollable Black Performance. In it, he examines the rewards and risks of “Black Virality"--rapidly repeated visual and sonic engagements with material and discursive Blackness, which are packaged as images, films, and viral videos that spread widely. He is also pursuing new research directions regarding communal ecstasy, the DJ, and the nuance between the meaning of a song, the feeling of it, and how that tension bears upon people marked by racialized gender. His recent work is housed in Women and Performance and a special issue on African American Performance in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies.

Amanda Reid is an assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance at Yale University. She is a dance 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 West Indian Decolonization, 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 and The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies (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.

Dr. Leticia L. Ridley is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Performance Studies at Santa Clara University. For the current 2022-2023 academic year, Leticia is a Rising Scholar fellow in the Department of Drama at the University of Virginia. Her primary teaching and research areas include African American theatre and performance, Black feminisms, Black performance theory, and popular culture. Leticia earned a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park, and her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation (where she was a Predoctoral Fellow) and the Mellon-funded African American Digital Humanities program (AADHum). Leticia is also the co-producer and co-host of Daughters of Lorraine, a Black feminist theatre podcast, which is supported by HowlRound Theatre Commons and recurring co-host on On Tap: A Theatre & Performance Studies Podcast. She is also a freelance dramaturg.

Dr. Shoniqua Roach 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. An American Council of Learned Societies and Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, her peer-reviewed work appears in venues such as Signs: journal of women in culture and society, differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, and American Quarterly, among others. Roach is currently at work on her book manuscript, Black Dwelling: Home-Making and Erotic Freedom, an intellectual and cultural history of Black domestic spaces as tragic sites of state invasion and Black feminist enactments of erotic freedom. She sits on the editorial board of Signs: a journal of Women in Culture and Society.

Danielle Roper is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature. She holds a Ph.D in Spanish and Portuguese (2015) and an M.A in Performance Studies (2009) from New York University. She specializes in contemporary racial and queer performance, racial formation, feminist activism, and visual culture in the Hemispheric Americas. Her work on Caribbean feminism, mestizaje, queer art, and racial impersonation has appeared in Latin American Research Review, SmallAxe, GLQ (forthcoming) and elsewhere. Roper is the curator of the virtual exhibition "Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive"

Cathy Thomas teaches English and Creative Writing at University of California at Santa Barbara. She is a creative critical scholar working on Black, American, and Caribbean literature and comic arts scholarship. Her current projects are a monograph, a novel, a collection of stories, two comics, and a visual art installation. Before academia, she worked in development and production at NBC, CBS, and Warner Bros and in a genetics lab at UCLA.

Contemporary dance instructor, cultural educator, poet and digital artist,  Roxy Régine THEOBALD works currently as a PhD researcher-practitioner and guest lecturer at IWAMD-UL. She has been awarded an Irish Research Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship (2022-2023). Graduated in linguistic, she holds a first class honours Master in Aesthetic Sciences and Technology of Arts combining Dance and theatre (France). Her thesis ' Altérité et aliénation en danse contemporaine (Otherness and alienation in contemporary dance), has been recognized as a significant contribution to the scholarship on contemporary dance in France and is available at the library of the National Dance Centre (CND-Pantin).

Tia-Monique is a lecturer in Contemporary Caribbean and African Diasporic Performance at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. As an artist-scholar, she critically engages Africanist dance as a vehicle for creating and interrogating African and African Diasporic worlds through interdisciplinary approaches and embodied research. Tia-Monique has presented and taught her work internationally and has published in the fields of Dance, Geography and Black feminism. Most recently, she directed and choreographed The Noise My Leaves Make – an award-winning short dance film exploring Black British women in rural English. Twitter: @tia-moniqueuzor

Cristal Chanelle Truscott, PhD is a culture worker, scholar, educator, playwright, director, founder of the touring ensemble Progress Theatre, and creator of “SoulWork” – a generative method for making performance, training artists, engaging communities and framing analytical research that is rooted in generations-old African American cultural practices, theories and performance traditions. She is a recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Artist Award, given to those “influential in shaping powerful creative movements in contemporary arts,” as well as the 2023 United States Artist Award, the Creative Capital Award, MAP Fund, NPN Creation Fund, and NEFA National Theatre Project grants.

Dr. Mesi Bakari Walton’s research intersects with Africana, Latin American, and Cultural Studies. Her work explores how Afro-diasporic cultures are employed as symbols of identity and tools of survival through cultural texts of music, dance, language, and other practices. In her hometown of Chicago, she trained and performed with Muntu Dance Theatre, West Indian Folk Dance Company, Minianka, and her own company Diaspora Dance. While attending Howard University, Dr. Walton co-founded Nsaa Dance Ensemble, the first African dance company on campus which was later invited to perform at the Petronio Álvarez festival, one of the largest festivals in Colombia, South America for Afro-Colombians. Dr. Bakari Walton recently completed research as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in Colombia titled, “Ancestral Identity - Afro-Colombian Cultural Traditions of the Atlantic Coast”. She has been invited to teach and perform at the Venezuelan and Colombian embassies in the U.S. as well as numerous schools, festivals in Chicago, DC, and other countries.  Dr. Bakari Walton completed her Ph.D. in Afro-Latin Studies and is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Afro-Diaspora Cultures at Howard University.  

Tara Aisha Willis is a dancer, writer, and Curator in Performance & Public Practice at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University, where she received the Deena Burton Memorial Scholarship in Dance Scholarship Award and was the first arts-focused candidate to receive the University-wide Outstanding Dissertation Award in Arts & Humanities. Her dissertation focused on contemporary practices of improvisation and experimentation in Black dance performances. Willis performed in a collaboration between Will Rawls and Claudia Rankine (2016–21) which traveled to Bard College, Danspace Project, Walker Art Center, REDCAT, MCA Chicago, and ICA Boston, and in the 2016 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award-winning performance by The Skeleton Architecture; she is a recent recipient of a Ragdale Foundation residency for her choreographic work. She held a Jerome Robbins Dance Division Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and has been an editorial collective member of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory since 2013. She has served as co-managing editor of TDR/The Drama Review, and was co-editor of both a special issue of The Black Scholar with Thomas F. DeFrantz and the performance writing project, Marking the Occasion (Wendy's Subway, 2021) with Jaime Shearn Coan.

Hershini Bhana Young is a professor at UT Austin in the Department of AADS and Women and Gender Studies. Her work resides at the intersections of disability, performance and sexuality. She is the author of
Haunting Capital: Memory, Text and the Black Diasporic Body (UPNE, 2005), Illegible Will: Coercive Spectacles of Labor in South Africa and the Diaspora (Duke UP, 2017), Falling, Floating, Flickering: Disability and Differential Movement in African Diasporic Performance (NYU, 2023) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Bodies in Performance (forthcoming).