Tavia Nyong’o

Sign up for office hours here

Tavia Nyong’o is Chair and William Lampson Professor of Performance Studies; American Studies; African-American Studies; and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Yale University. His books include The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York University Press, 2018).

His current research interests include: the performative turn in museum curation; the racial reckoning in theater, dance, and performance; racial and sexual dissidence in art and culture; and the cultural history of the metaverse.

He is completing a short introduction to critical negativity in Black Studies under contract with the series American Studies Now (University of California Press), and continuing two additional book projects: i) a cultural history of race, sex, and gender in Downtown New York, post-war, and ii) a work for a general audience on the racial reckoning in theater in the twenty-first century.

Editor-at-large for the journal Social Text, Nyong’o is also on the editorial boards of TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies, Theatre, and Contemporary Theatre Review. He co-edits the Sexual Cultures book series at NYU Press with Ann Pellegrini and Joshua Chambers-Letson.

Nyong’o has received fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Society for Theatre Research, the Ford Foundation, the Jacob K. Javits Foundation, and the British Marshall Foundation.

Since 2021, Nyong’o has also curated public programs at the Park Avenue Armory.