The Racial Reckoning in Art & Performance at Yale
Tavia Nyong’o
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.
Alex Fialho
Alex Fialho is a 5 th year PhD candidate in Yale University’s Combined PhD program in the History of Art and African American Studies. As an art historian and curator, Fialho’s scholarship focuses on modern and contemporary art, Black feminist and queer theory, and AIDS cultural studies. His dissertation thinks through photography by African American artists and archives of their work as apertures onto AIDS-related art histories. Fialho is a 2023–2024 Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
Fialho identifies as a white, queer, HIV-negative, cisgender person (he/they). Their work in community intends to be in service and support of queer, femme, Black and anti-racist creative practices. Prior to graduate school, Fialho worked as Programs Director of the New York-based arts non-profit Visual AIDS from 2014–2019, facilitating projects around the history and immediacy of the ongoing AIDS pandemic, while intervening against the widespread whitewashing of HIV/AIDS cultural narratives. Fialho’s writing on artists King Cobra, Beauford Delaney, Juliana Huxtable, Glenn Ligon, Michael Richards, Kenya (Robinson), Devan Shimoyama and Sable Elyse Smith has been published in exhibition catalogs for the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Andy Warhol Museum, and more.
Simon Wu
Simon Wu is an artist and writer involved in collaborative art production and research. Since 2017, he has served as a Curator and Program Coordinator for Claudia Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute. He has held curatorial positions at MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the New Museum and he has organized exhibitions and programs at David Zwirner, The Kitchen, and CUE Art Foundation, among other places. In 2021 his art writing was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant and he was featured in Cultured magazine’s 2021 Young Curators series. He writes for Artforum, Bookforum, BOMB, frieze, and The Drift. In 2018 he was named the Van Lier Fellow in Curation by the Asian American Arts Alliance and in 2018-2019 he was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He is a 2nd year PhD in the History of Art at Yale University and his first book, a collection of essays on art, collectivity, and joy titled Dancing On My Own, will be released in 2024 through Harper Collins.