She is a literary, film, and multimedia art critic specializing in Black contemporary speculative and experimental practices, namely horror and science fiction. Her research questions and reading methods are rooted in Black studies; she addresses philosophical concerns of alternative epistemology, ontology, and world-building.
Her art practice spans across printmaking, acrylic painting, and digital illustration/collage. Her goal is to experiment, playing with color, texture, and otherworldly representations.
I received my PhD in English from the University of Washington, my MA in English from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, and my BA in English from Tennessee State University.
My research engages Black speculative creative practices and their responses to alternative ways of being, knowing, and world-building that center Black life and thought.
My dissertation, “Imagine Another World: A Philosophical Approach to Black Speculative Arts and Literature,” examines Black fantasy films, surreal poems, science fiction novels, and horror short stories. Drawing on feminist and queer theories, I historicize the contemporary moment as one in which Black imaginations across the world are collectively building fantastic other worlds in art and literature, worlds that contain alternative social and political infrastructures designed to meet Black desires.
My inaugural book project, tentatively titled Otherworldly Ontologies: Reading Practices for Contemporary Black Science Fiction and Horror, builds on theories of affect, ecstasy, and the arts. I demonstrate how 21st-century Black horror and science fiction experimentally reconfigure ways of being for audiences to vicariously experience.
One chapter is a genre study that traces the methods of building horror worlds so that they can be viscerally experienced, like sensations. I examine how Nnedi Okorafor anthropomorphizes mythical dark figures rooted in Nigerian folk stories in “Dark Home” (2023) and how actresses practice hoodoo to embody and engage demons in Bree Newsome's Wake (2010).
Each of my chapters engages concepts of opacity, revenge, affect, unknowability, and the possibilities that otherworldly expressions offer.
As a curator, project coordinator, and arts writer, I embody queer sensibility. I challenge traditional exhibitions and writing standards. Through experimentation, I break institutional barriers. When I analyze an artwork, I note the textures, colors, and materials and articulate how these qualities impact my mood and thoughts. I prioritize art shows that offer embodied and ecstatic experiences that engage multiple senses.
My scholarship also influences my visual arts practices. I am a printmaker and digital illustration artist. To explore alternative world building, I create works where I manipulate and distort human and animal bodies, making bricolage beings. And I play with color and texture to make abstract shapes and patterns. I offer visual stories of how I conceptualize another realm for myself.
With all of my projects I ask: How is this work, or how can I be, curious about alternative ways of being and knowing? And how can this alternative life be sustained in another world? Because of these alternative ways of living, what is made possible/what can be found in this other world that is not possible/not found in our current reality?
