Scholar

Rocío Zambrana

Professor of Philosophy at University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras
Rocío Zamabrana teaches and writes about the epistemic and historical-material bases of capitalist modernity and its racial/gender order, specifically from decolonial thought and praxis, particularly in the context of financial capitalism in the Caribbean. She is currently writing a book entitled Metamorphosis of Value: Epistemic Protocols in the Longue Durée, which traces the emergence of figures of speculation (economic/racial) endemic to capitalism through a consideration of the trade-plantation complex in early modern Caribbean. She is also...

Ajuan Mance

Visual Artist, Author, Editor, and a Professor of Ethnic Studies and English at Mills College

Ajuan Mance is a Professor of African American literature at Mills College in Oakland, California. A lifelong artist and writer, Ajuan has participated in solo and group exhibitions as well as comic and zine fests, from the Bay Area to Brooklyn. In her art, illustration, and comics, Ajuan uses humor and bright colors to explore race, gender, power, and the people and places in which they intersect. Her work has appeared in a number of digital and print media outlets, including, most recently, The Women’s Review of Books, Blavity.com, BET.com, Transition...

Jean Ma

Scholar of Film and Media History and Theory and Former Professor in Film and Media Studies Program at Stanford

Jean Ma is a scholar of film and media history and theory, with specializations in Asian cinema, gender, sexuality, sound studies, and moving image art. Her books include Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema; Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema; and Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography. She serves on the editorial board of Film Quarterly and is coeditor of the book series Music, Sound, and Media at the University of California Press.

From 2006 to 2023 she taught at Stanford University, where she...

Siren Leirvåg

Professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Oslo

Siren Leirvåg (born 1962) works at the Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo. She graduated as Cand. Philol in Theater Studies from the University of Bergen in 1989 and has taught and supervised theater studies at several Norwegian educational institutions and has also worked as an examiner for several years. She has written textbooks and published articles on performing arts in national and international books and journals. Leirvåg is currently working on a book about Stein Bugge, the Bergen theater ideologist, director and...

Simon Leung

Professor of Art at UC Irvine

Simon Leung’s foremost concern as an artist is how “the ethical,” broadly defined, can be thought and traced. His projects, in various media, include a rethinking of AIDS and otherness using the figures of the pinprick and the glory hole; meditations on “the residual space of the American/Vietnam War” (comprising works on the squatting body as counter-architecture, military desertion as askesis, and surfing); a video essay on the site/non-site dialectic instigated by Robert Smithson’s reception of Edgar Allan Poe (with a little help from Yvonne Rainer); a reconsideration...

André Lepecki

Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and Associate Dean in the Center for Research and Study at the Tisch School of the Arts

André Lepecki works and researches at the intersection of critical dance studies, curatorial practice, performance theory, contemporary dance and visual arts performance. Selected curatorial work includes Chief Curator of the festival IN TRANSIT (2008 and 2009 editions) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Co-curator of the archive Dance and Visual Arts since 1960s for the exhibition MOVE: choreographing you, Hayward Gallery (2010). Curator of the lecture series Points of Convergence: performance and visual arts (2014) and Off-Hinge Off Center: alternative histories of...

Raina J. León

Poet, Writer, and Former Professor of Education at Saint Mary’s College of California

Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo. She is the author of black god mother this...

Việt Lê

Artist, Writer, Chair of Graduate Visual and Critical Studies Program and an Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at California College of the Arts

Việt Lê is an artist, writer, and curator whose work over the past twenty years examines spiritualities, trauma, representation and sexualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas, as well as intersectional coalitions. Dr. Lê is the author of Return Engagements: Contemporary Art’s Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh (Duke University Press, June 2021). Arguing for an ethics of return, this book is a political-...

Thomas Jean Lax

Writer and Curator in the Department of Media and Performance at MoMA

Thomas Jean Lax is a curator and writer specializing in black art, queer study and performance. At the Museum of Modern Art, they organized the exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces (2022) about the gallery, founded by Linda Goode Bryant in 1974 where “blackness existed in the presence of black folks rather than in the absence of whiteness.”...

Grace Lavery

ARC Fellow, Associate Professor of English Critical Theory and Gender and Women's Studies at UC Berkeley

Grace Lavery is a writer, editor, and academic living in Brooklyn, NY. As an Associate Professor of English, Critical Theory, and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, her research explores the history and theory of aesthetics and interpretation, with particular interests in psychoanalysis, literary realism, and queer and trans cultures. Her speculative memoir, Please Miss, was published by Seal Press in 2022.

Her first book,...