A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, Tavia Nyong’o is the William Lampson Professor of American Studies at Yale University, with award-winning books including The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York University Press, 2018) and Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World (University of California Press, 2025). His work in critical theory and performance studies explores the intersection of history, imagination, and Black aesthetic life through the lens of performance. Tavia Nyong'o's public-facing writings have appeared in prominent publications such as Vogue, *them*, *The Nation*, *n+1*, *Artforum*, *Texte Zur Kunst*, *Cabinet*, *Triple Canopy*, *The New Inquiry*, and *NPR*. and has been recognized with fellowships from prestigious foundations such as the Ford Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He serves on multiple editorial boards and co-edits the *Sexual Cultures* book series at NYU Press with Ann Pellegrini and Joshua Chambers-Letson. Currently curating public programs at the Park Avenue Armory, Nyong'o is completing groundbreaking research on topics ranging from digital technology's cultural history to racial and sexual dissidence in art and culture.

CV

ACADEMIC APPOINTMENT

YEAR

William Lampson Professor of American Studies, African American Studies and Theater & Performance Studies, Yale University

2020–

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 University

2015

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 University

2003

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.

PROJECTS READING CONTACT

Portal 1

The Last Human Generation

My grandfather once sat me down to explain how to become a millionaire. He brought out a chunky printing calculator, the kind that unspooled figures on paper like receipts at the grocery store, and demonstrated compound interest to me. I was intrigued by the possibility that I, too, could grow up to be a millionaire like him, that his path of steady, clinking accumulation could also be mine. But my youthful avarice was tempered by mixed feelings about a man whom I had not seen at all in the first decade of my life. When I did at last meet him, at around the age of this first wealth-building instruction, he was gruff and remonstrating, forever disgruntled with the workings of the world and the possibility that I might be contributing to that dysfunction already, even as just a small child. So, while I was an apt pupil for his savings lesson (not least because there was no one else in my childhood to teach it) I did balk a little at its price. Would growing up to have a million dollars have to mean growing up to be just like him?

For my mother, solo parenting four children while leading a life of medical service in Africa meant that money was frequently too tight to mention. So, when her estranged father came back into our lives in my early teens, I paid attention to any Santa Claus signs among his eccentricities, even though I had been prepped by my mother’s cautionary tales to be on my guard. When he reappeared, he did so with a lot of firm opinions. Opinions about what kind of cars to drive (domestic, never foreign). What food to put in your body (vegetable oil, never butter, ancient grains not commercial wheat). How to live a useful life (be an engineer like him). The lesson in compounding interest was intended to teach a child like me — I struck adults as equal parts hyperactive and dreamy — to buckle down and focus on matters of long-term consequence. It was meant to reveal the dynamo of engineering, and my grandfather had several patents, technical papers, and even a book to his name, as I would learn well after his death. Knowing none of that as a child, nor what it could possibly mean, I could only intuit the presence here of vast systems, working on timelines outside my conscious awareness, that would nonetheless determine my life.

Grandpa T was also a real-estate investor, a proverbial self-made “American dream” man, although his manner of living was so crotchety and abstemious by the time I knew him — in his third bachelorhood — that he seemed to me to deny himself all the pleasures of the flesh that I imagined should come with American bounty. Our home ran according to a “live simply so that others may simply live” ethos that my mother drew from Quakerism, but that quietist faith was filled with a kindliness I never discerned in my grandfather’s stoicism. There was no television in his house any more than there was in ours, but somehow that absence meant different things to those domestic spaces. Twice-divorced, grandpa’s dining room was lined with shelves and shelves of vitamins and supplements. It struck me even as a young child that his motives for extending life were suspect, since his drive to accumulate wealth, design cars, and command others had ultimately cost him the hugs and tickles that I imagined, then, were the reason for existence. It had also driven him to a level of paranoia, I would learn shortly after he died, that had extended to bugging his own home. Even before I knew about the Nixon-esque surveillance system he had installed, my youthful antennae were out against this anxious, ill-tempered man whenever he was near me. But despite it all, it never occurred to me to hate him.

It also never occurred to me to inquire too closely as to why I, among my siblings, was given a computer (for what reason? A birthday? I do not now recall), the first such device to enter our home. I took the computer home, plugged it in, and proceeded to attempt to teach myself programming. I can’t recall the make or model (was it a Texas Instruments?) or the programming language (was it BASIC?), but I do recall spending several frustrating hours over several days at the command line, trying to submit to the unforgiving logic of a code that would crash at a single error. To quote Truman Capote, I wasn’t coding, I was typing, and the lack of results showed. I was trying to write a program that would draw a picture of a balloon, or something like that, but I was coming up zero.

The large device stayed in my room, however, across several international moves. Even non-functioning, it retained a talismanic, ornamental place on my desk up through my teenage years. In Kenya, where we lived, I believe I was the only boy in school with a personal computer at home, perhaps the only person of any age. I would occasionally admire its shape and pride of place on the adult-sized desk, next to a stack of impressive instructional books I would pore over as if they were grimoires. Even though I never used that PC, I projected a future for myself in which I would. My grandfather's lesson took, in the end, though not in the currency he had in mind. The interest, it turned out, was compounding in me.

COMING SOON

Portal 2

Music

Portal 3

Literature

Portal 4

Portal 1

The Last Human Generation

Music

Literature

The Arts