BIO
Tavia Nyong'o is a critic and scholar of art and performance. He is William Lampson professor of African American studies, American studies and theater and performance studies at Yale University where he teaches courses on black diaspora performance, cultural studies, and critical and aesthetic theory.

CV

ACADEMIC APPOINTMENT

YEAR

William Lampson Professor of American Studies, African American Studies and Theater & Performance Studies, Yale University

2020–

Chair of Theater & Performance Studies, Yale University.

2019–2023

Professor of American Studies, African American Studies and Theater & Performance Studies, Yale University.

2016–

Visiting Scholar in American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California.

2017–18

Acting Chair of Performance Studies, New York University

2015

Associate Professor of Performance Studies, New York University.

2009–2016

Assistant Professor of Performance Studies, New York University.

2003–2009

EDUCATION

Ph.D. in American Studies, Yale University

2003

B.A. College of Social Studies, Wesleyan University, Highest Honors.

1995

PUBLICATIONS

WORK IN PROGRESS

The Last Human Generation: Essays
The Racial Reckoning in Art and Performance

MONOGRAPHS

Black Apocalypse: The Glitch at the End of the World. University of California Press, American Studies Now Series (in press).

Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. New York University Press, 2018.
2019 Winner, Barnard Hewitt Award, American Society for Theatre Research, best book in theatre history or cognate disciplines.

The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of Memory. University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 2010 Winner, Errol Hill Award, American Society for Theatre Research,best book in African American theater, drama, and performance studies.

EDITED MONOGRAPH

José Esteban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown. Duke University Press 2020. Co-edited with Joshua Chambers-Letson.

EDITED JOURNAL ISSUES

“Presence,” a special issue of TDR: The Drama Review 66.4 2022. Co-edited with Elise Morrison and Kimberly Jannarone.

“Algorithms and Performance,” a special issue of TDR: The Drama Review 63.4 (Winter 2019). Co-edited with Elise Morrison and Joseph Roach.

“Wildness,” a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 117.3 (July 2018). Co-edited with Jack Halberstam.

“Being With: A special issue on the work of José Esteban Muñoz” Social Text 32.4 (2014). Co-edited with the Being With research cluster.

“Precarious Situations: Race, Gender, Globality.” Special Issue of Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 23.2 (2013).

“Queer/Trans.” Special Issue of Journal of Popular Music Studies 25.4 (2013). Co-edited with Francesca Royster.

“Punk and It’s Afterlives,” a special Issue of Social Text 117 (2013). Co-edited with Jayna Brown and Patrick Deer.

“Recall and Response: Black Women Performers and the Mapping of Memory,” a special issue of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 16.1 (2006). Co-edited with Jayna Brown.

REFERRED JOURNAL ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS

“Sound and Color: A Curator’s Introduction” co-written with Jane Cox, Theater 53 (3): 66–73

“Unburdening Liveness,” TDR (2022) Vol 66 No 4: pp. 28-36

“So Far Down You Can’t See the Light: Afro-Fabulation in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon” in Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones, Jr., and Shane Vogel, eds., Race and Performance after Repetition (Durham, Duke University Press, 2020), 29-45.

PROJECTS READING CONTACT

Black Apocalypse Afrofuturism at the End of the World

About the Book

Juxtaposing the world-building of afrofuturism and the world-negating of afropessimism to show how both movements have offered us critical resources of hope.

Science fiction imagines aliens and global crises as world-unifying events, both a threat and promise for the future. Black Apocalypse is an introduction to the past and present of black engagement with speculative futures. From Octavia Butler to W.E.B. Du Bois to Sun Ra, Tavia Nyong’o shows that the end of the world is crucial to afrofuturism and reframes the binary of afropessimism and afrofuturism to explore their similarities.

Interweaving black trans, queer, and feminist theories, Nyong'o examines the social, technological, and existential threats facing our species and reflects on shifting anxieties and hopes for the future. Exploring the apocalypse in movies, art, literature, and music, this book considers the endless afterlives of slavery and inequality and revives the radical black imagination to envision the future of blackness. Black Apocalypse argues that black aesthetics take us to the edge of this world and into the next.

About the Author

Tavia Nyong’o is the author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. He is a professor of performance studies at Yale University and a curator at the Park Avenue Armory.

Reviews

"Black Apocalypse argues that there is no fixing the place of blackness and antiblackness in contemporary radical thought. Tavia Nyong’o contends that neither utopian nor nihilistic schools of thought are properly equipped for the possible futures envisioned in black creative practice: futures that are even worse than we dream of in our philosophy."—andré carrington, author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction

“In Black Apocalypse, Nyong’o puts the African back into afropessimism, while nimbly dancing through several traditions of black thought. He refuses to choose between afrofuturism and afropessimism and proposes that this is a false choice. We can be pessimistic, he insists, but we can and must also acknowledge that the future is black, fierce, and coming soon.”—Jack Halberstam, author of Trans*

"Nyong’o parses urgent questions in contemporary black thought with signal clarity, insight, and elegance. Black Apocalypse is an important and necessary book."—Ekow Eshun, author of In the Black Fantastic

"In Black Apocalypse, Nyong’o brings his deep intellectual rigor to the question of how black futures can be imagined in a world that has already ended many times over for black people. Having had the privilege of working with Tavia at the Park Avenue Armory during my show Assembly, I’ve seen firsthand his ability to engage with radical ideas of black survival, resilience, and imagination. His book resonates with my own explorations of black interiority and afrofuturist utopias, as we both seek to dismantle limiting narratives about black life. Black Apocalypse boldly reframes the apocalypse not as an ending, but as an opportunity for black cultural regeneration and collective liberation—a vision that inspires and challenges artists like myself who aim to decolonize the future."––Dr. Rashaad Newsome, multidisciplinary artist