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

Dark as a Door
to a Dream

Stedelijk Museum, NL
March 30, 2019

PARTICIPANTS
Jayna Brown
Tina Campt
Tiona Nekkia McCLodden
Naima Ramos Chapman
Luke Willis Thompson

This study day at the Stedelijk Museum explores the aesthetics practices of Afro-surrealism through a kaleidoscope of feminist, queer and trans* optics. We seek to decolonize surrealism from the Eurocentric frame of art history and colonial anthropology, and look expansively at black (and black) art forms that take on the fantastical, the mythical and the otherworldly. Desire and transgression stoke the roots of resistance and build momentum for rebellion. We seek a day to study these movements of the imagination. Resisting institutional and intellectual tendencies to separate blackness and indigeneity, we wish to reconnect Afro-surrealism to a planet-spanning archipelago of freedom dreams, fugitive escapades and dissident genders. Transgression is not the sole purview of white men seeking to escape the prison-house of normotic conformity. Nor are we the spirit guides and magical negroes of a dying Eurocentrism. We are interested in how the often obscene hallucinatory reality of blak (and black) life can cinform art in form and content, and help us re-envision what we mean by freedom and selfhood.