Nottingham Contemporary

Douglas Crimp was an art historian, activist and Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. His research centred around postmodern theories of art, institutional critique, and queer theory. He is the author of AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (1988), On the Museum’s Ruins (1993), Melancholia and Moralism – Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (2002), and Before Pictures (2016).

Mark Fisher was a writer, cultural theorist and philosopher based in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Fisher wrote extensively on radical politics, music and popular culture for publications including The Wire, Fact and New Statesman, and received acclaim for his blogging as K-punk in the early 2000s. He is the author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009), Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014) and Post-Punk Then and Now (2016). He was the co-founder of Zero Books and Repeater Books.

Desta Hailé is a writer, vocalist and educator. She is the Creative Director of Languages through Music and co-founder of Sisters Only Language Summit. Hailé is the author of York to Teheran (2020), which won the 2020 To Speak Europe in Different Languages prize, and the upcoming publication Black Beauty Model Agency (2021).

Tim Lawrence is Professor of Cultural Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London. Lawrence’s research focusses on the history of music culture in the United States and in particular New York. He is the author of Love Saves the day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-79 (2003) and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-83 (2016).

Tavia Nyong’o is Chair and Professor of Theater & Performance Studies at Yale University. He is the author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009) and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018), and of numerous articles in black and queer art, music, literature and performance. A long serving member of the Social Text collective, he co-edits the Sexual Cultures book series from NYU Press.

Ricardo Montez is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at The New School. His research examines the performance of race, ethnicity and sexuality in visual culture and media. He was a Faculty Fellow in Latino Studies at New York University and held the Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellowship in Race and Ethnicity Studies in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University. His book, Keith Haring’s Line: Race and the Performance of Desire (2020), considers cross-racial desire in Haring’s life and art.

José Esteban Muñoz was Professor and Chair of Performance Studies at New York University. His works include Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009), and The Sense of Brown (2020). He was Co-Editor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996) and Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (1997) and founding Co-Editor of the Sexual Cultures series at NYU Press.

Irenosen Okojie is a writer and the author of Butterfly Fish (2015), the recipient of the 2016 Betty Trask Award, and Speak Gigantular (2016), a short story collection shortlisted for the 2016 inaugural Jhalak Prize and the 2017 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She was fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. Her new collection of stories, Nudibranch (Dialogue Books, 2019) was longlisted for the 2020 Jhalak Prize and the included story ‘Grace Jones’ won the 2020 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. Okojie’s upcoming novel, Curandera, will be published by Dialogue Books in 2022.