PROJECT INDEX
TYPETITLEDATE
CURATED Antagonisms: A Gathering2024.06.01
CURATED Fugitive Intimacies2023.08.12
CURATED  Sound and Color2023.01.13
WRITTEN Unburdening Liveness2022.12.09
CURATED Art at Waters Edge2022.09.09
CURATED Captcha: Dancing, Data, Liberation2022.02.09
CURATED Dark as a Door to a Dream2019.03.30

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 University2020–
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 University2015
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 University2003
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.

FUGITIVE 
INTIMACIES

BOFFO Performance Festival


Fire Island,
New York
August 2023ASSISTANT CURATOR
Buffy

FEATURING
Mayfield Brooks
Dazié Grego Skyes
Joseph Pierce
Dorian Wood
Cassils
Shamel Pitts | Tribe
Goth Jafar
Papi Juice
A full day of gloriously insurgent performance, music, and dance as a dynamic lineup of path breaking artists gather for a clandestine escape from the normative world. BOFFO performance festival welcomes Cassils, Dazié Grego-Sykes, Dorian Wood, mayfield brooks, Shamel Pitts | TRIBE, Papi Juice and their collaborators for festival 2023. Writer and scholar Joseph M. Pierce crafts a text inspired by the festival artists’ work and their ongoing engagement with the festival’s curatorial theme, fugitive intimacies. By way of the curatorial invitation, the artists will perform transformative live works of art that engage the island’s history, dive into the beach’s unique ecologies, and resist the normative structures of performance. Running with and elaborating BOFFO’s mission of supporting experimental art and fostering dynamic social environments, a space of queer sociality assembles, where the rules of performance might be suspended. Inspired by the featured artists and their passionately revolutionary practices, Fugitive Intimacies both foregrounds relation and evades enclosure in favor of worlds that engender new forms of intimacy and friendship between collectivities and generations. With warm sand, rolling waves, and seaside winds, the featured artists set in motion new futures for queer kinship across temporalities. At once taking flight with vibrant style and grounding us in the social present, 2024’’s festival proposes a radiant departure from the terms of conformity and proposes rebelliously queer possibilities for encountering each other and moving together.