Current Postdoctoral Fellow
Bimbola Akinbola
Bimbola Akinbola’s research examines how women artists of the Nigerian diaspora use contemporary visual art, performance, film, and literature to contest and redefine their familial, cultural, and national belonging in Nigeria and its diasporas. Foregrounding the work of women artists who straddle multiple geographies, identities, and allegiances, her project analyzes how these artists resist trauma narratives of loss and displacement by illuminating the generative potential of what she calls “disbelonging.” As a scholar of museums and material culture, Akinbola also researches the museum space as a site of dissent and collaboration for visitors, and the race, class, and gender politics of “community engaged” programming.
An interdisciplinary artist and scholar, she regularly collaborates with Dance Exchange, a multidisciplinary and cross-generational performance company, where she has contributed to several movement-based projects exploring racism, memory, and historical erasure with communities across the United States.
Past Black Performing Arts Postdoctoral Fellow
Fumi Okiji (2016-2018)
Fumi Okiji’s research explicates the ways in which black expression provides alternative epistemologies. Her forthcoming book Conglomeration of Deviates: Jazz, Adorno and the Critical Potential of Black Expression shows how the music, as expression of life that incessantly calls into question the world’s integrity, provides social critique and models an alternative mode of sociality. She is currently working on two projects. The first, centered on a response to Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, looks at black intimacy and wounded kinship through a particularized lens of a Western woman of Nigerian descent. The other is a practice-enabled research project that theorizes and experiments with vandalism/breakage of record(s) and a refusal to document, as ways to alternative epistemological frameworks. Okiji is also a singer and makes sound works.
Kashif Powell (2014-2016)
Kashif’s dissertation, “Specters and Spooks: Developing a Hauntology of the Performative Black Body,” examines the relationship between the black body and the history of death, particularly as it relates to how the black body performed under the institution of slavery. He is also an accomplished performer, having recently created a solo show titled, “Sketches of a Man, based on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
Jade Huell (2012-2014)
Jade C. Huell is the inaugural Black Performing Arts Fellow in the Department of Performance Studies. After receiving a B.A. in Communication at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina, she earned an M.A. in English and a Certificate of Graduate Study in Gender Studies from the University of South Carolina. In 2011, Jade was awarded the Marie J. Robinson Scholarship by the National Communication Association’s Performance Studies Division. She has recently earned her PhD in Communication Studies at Louisiana State University. During her doctoral studies, Jade conceived and produced three ensemble performances centered on Black Diaspora performance practices and nostalgia as a conceptual frame for viewing and expressing aesthetic and everyday performance. She is currently continuing her research in theories of the body, memory, and performance.