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 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).