Tavia Nyong’o

Tavia Nyong’o is a scholar of performance, race, sexuality, and aesthetics whose work moves between Black studies, queer theory, and the history of art and popular culture. Trained in American Studies and deeply engaged with the minoritarian traditions that have reshaped it, he writes about how bodies, images, and archives carry the unfinished business of democracy. He is the author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009), Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018), and most recently Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World (2025), which explores Black speculative art and electronic sound as practices of survival within ongoing crisis. Across his books and essays, Nyong’o analyzes race and gender as epistemic and libidinal formations—modes through which power organizes knowledge, embodiment, and imagination—tracking how they are reproduced and reconfigured through performance, visual culture, and speculative art and literature. At Yale, he teaches courses on Black queer art and literature, science fiction and cultural history, and performance curation, inviting students to read deeply and think capaciously about culture’s role in world-making. Beyond the classroom, his curatorial and public humanities work extends these questions into live spaces of encounter, where theory can meet the urgencies and exigencies of the present.