Tavia Nyong’o

Sign up for office hours here

Tavia Nyong’o studies Black queer performance, speculative aesthetics, and affective historiography. He is the author of 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). He co-edited José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown (Duke University Press, 2020) with Joshua Chambers-Letson. His current work spans the performative turn in museum practice, the re-examination of “race” and racism in performance and aesthetics, racial and sexual dissidence in art, and the self-conscious end of unaugmented thought.

A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, Nyong’o is the author of Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World (University of California Press, 2025), which reframes the binary of afropessimism and afrofuturism to explore Black speculative thought at the edge of planetary crisis. He continues work on two additional books: a cultural history of race, sex, and gender in postwar Downtown New York, and a public-facing study of the racial reckoning in contemporary art and performance.

A member of the Practicing Refusal Collective, Nyong’o has participated in the Sojourner Project, an international mobile Black Studies academy that convenes transnational dialogues on blackness, anti-black violence, and Black futurity. He curates public programs at the Park Avenue Armory (since 2021) and has written widely in arts and culture publications. Nyong’o serves as editor-at-large of Social Text, sits on the editorial boards of TDR, Theatre, and Contemporary Theatre Review, and co-edits NYU Press’s Sexual Cultures series (with Ann Pellegrini and Joshua Chambers-Letson).

His fellowships include awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, American Society for Theatre Research, Ford Foundation, Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program, and British Marshall Foundation.