Institute Senior Fellow
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings. Her work in this lifetime is to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice. Her poetic work in response to the needs of her cherished communities has held space for multitudes in mourning and movement. Alexis’s co-edited volume Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016) has shifted the conversation on mothering, parenting and queer transformation. Alexis has transformed the scope of intellectual, creative and oracular writing with her triptych of experimental works published by Duke University Press (Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity in 2016, M Archive: After the End of the World in 2018 and Dub: Finding Ceremony, 2020.) Unlike most academic texts, Alexis’s work has inspired artists across form to create dance works, installation work, paintings, processionals, divination practices, operas, quilts and more.
Alexis is the founder of Brilliance Remastered, an online network and series of retreats and online intensives serving community accountable intellectuals and artists in the legacies of Audre Lorde’s profound statement in “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” that the preceding statement is “only threatening to those…who still think of the master’s house as their only source of support.” Through retreats on ancestor accountable intellectual practice, and online courses on topics from anger as a resource to transnational intellectual solidarity Alexis and her Brilliance Remastered collaborators have nurtured a community of thinkers and artists grounded in the resources that normative institutions ignore.
Institute Fellows: Patrick Anderson, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Una Chaudhuri, and Misty De Berry
Patrick Anderson
Patrick Anderson is a professor of Communication, Ethnic Studies, and Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. He is the author of So Much Wasted (Duke UP 2010), Autobiography of a Disease (Routledge 2017), and The Lamentations: a requiem for queer suicide (Fordham, forthcoming in 2024), and the co-editor (with Jisha Menon) of Violence Performed (Palgrave 2009). With Nicholas Ridout, he co-edits the Performance Works book series at Northwestern University Press. He holds certifications in the community oversight of law enforcement and as a Death Doula.
Joshua Chambers-Letson
Joshua Chambers-Letson is Professor of Performance Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. At present completing a monograph on Queer Love and Loss, JCL is the author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America; co-editor of José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown with Tavia Nyong’o and of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital with Christine Mok; as well as series co-editor of NYU Press’s Sexual Cultures series with Tavia Nyong’o and Ann Pellegrini.
Una Chaudhuri
Una Chaudhuri is Collegiate Professor & Professor of English, Drama, and Environmental Studies at New York University, where she also serves as Dean for the Humanities and Vice-Dean for Interdisciplinary Initiatives. She is a scholar of environmental humanities with a focus on theatre history, performance studies, and dramatic literature. She has been a pioneer in the field of “eco-theatre”—plays and performances that engage with the subjects of ecology and environment—as well as the related field of ecocriticism, which studies art and literature from an ecological perspective. She helped launch both these fields when she guest-edited a special issue of Yale’s Theater journal on “Theatre and Ecology” in 1994. Her introduction to that issue, entitled “‘There Must Be a Lot of Fish in That Lake’ Theorizing a Theatre Ecology,” is widely credited as a seminal contribution to the field. Professor Chaudhuri was also among the first scholars of drama and theatre to engage with another rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field, Animal Studies. She has written and lectured widely on two concepts she has proposed and theorized: “Zooësis,” the discourse and representation of species in contemporary culture and performance, and “AnthropoScenes,” dramaturgies beyond the human. Her current research explores what she calls “ecospheric consciousness”: ideas, feelings, and practices that attend to the multi-species and geo-physical contexts of human lives. Chaudhuri is the author and editor of several books, including The Stage Lives of Animals: Zooesis and Performance, The Ecocide Project: Research Theatre and Climate Change (co-author), and Animal Acts: The Stage Lives of Animals (co-editor).
Misty De Berry
Misty De Berry is an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. She works across the fields of performance studies, Black Feminist thought, queer of color critique, aesthetic criticism, and critical theory. Both her scholarly and artistic work take up the relationship between Black women, durational performance, and everyday behavioral practices under late capitalism in the U.S. She is currently working on a book manuscript, In Due Time: Performance and the Psychic Life of Black Debt, which explores routine modes of debt and indebtedness in the lives of Black women’s, and their subsequent engagement with both aesthetic and everyday performance to dismantle such routines. Misty’s current performance piece, little sister: an Afro-Temporal Solo-Play, tells the story of a nomadic child spirit who shape-shifts across several incarnations of Black queer women—spanning the Antebellum South to present moment Chicago. In addition to her research and performance work, Misty engages in building communities through her training in transformative justice and Reiki healing modalities. Misty is both a co-organizer of the Institute as well as a Fellow.