Going Dark

Kimberly Juanita Brown serves as the inaugural director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life. She is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of contemporary literatures of the Black diaspora and visual culture studies. She is the author of The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press, 2015), and Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual (MIT Press, 2024). Brown is currently completing her third book, Black Elegies, about the art of mourning in contemporary cultural productions. She is the founder and convener of the Dark Room: Race and Visual Culture Studies Seminar. The Dark Room is a working group of women of color scholars, artists, and curators whose work examines critical race theory and visual culture studies. Brown is an associate professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing.

micha cárdenas, PhD, is an artist and Associate Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Performance, Play & Design, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she directs the Critical Realities Studio. Her book Poetic Operations, Duke University Press (2022), proposes algorithmic analysis to develop a trans of color poetics. Poetic Operations was the co-winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize in 2022 from the National Women’s Studies Association. cárdenas’s co-authored books The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) and Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs (2010) were published by Atropos Press. She is a first generation Colombian American.

Anjali Nath is Assistant Professor in Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her work focuses on the visual culture of American militarism, with a focus on document redaction, transparency, and the archives of state violence. Her current book project, A Thousand Paper Cuts: US Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War, is a critical reckoning with the racial and imperial work of paper as mobilized in the service of American militarism. Nath’s research has been supported by the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the University of California office of the President, and the UC Davis Humanities Institute. Her essays and writing have appeared in American Quarterly, Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, Studies in Documentary Film, Visual Anthropology and elsewhere. Nath co-edits the newly inaugurated Critical Militarization Studies book series on University of Michigan Press, with Dr. Crystal Baik. Prior to joining the faculty at UTM, Nath held positions at University of California, Davis and the American University of Beirut.

Sue Shon, Ph.D. is. Her research and teaching interests include critical race and ethnic studies, aesthetic theory, and diasporic literatures and visual cultures. She is currently working on a monograph, Racial Sense and the Making of Aesthetic Modernity, which tells the story of how race acquired a visual feel due to constraints in the language of modern human perception. Sue received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington, M.A. in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and B.A. in Fine Arts and English from the University of Pennsylvania.

Balbir K. Singh is Canada Research Chair in Art and Racial Justice, as well as Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. She is the Director of Dark Opacities Lab, a hub for BIPOC political and aesthetic study and strategy. Using anti-colonial methods of reading and sensing, Singh builds on theories of opacity in her in-progress manuscript “Militant Bodies: Racial/Religious Opacity and Minoritarian Self-Defense,” which takes a materialist feminist approach to explore questions that center post-9/11 racial and religious hyper-policing of Muslim and Sikh bodies. Currently, she serves as Reviews Editor for Art Journal and is part of the Journal of Visual Culture’s Editorial Colelctive. Singh has been published in journals including Sikh Formations, Critical Ethnic Studies, QED, Surveillance and Society, Rhizomes, the Journal of Asian American Studies, Spectra, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures in the Americas.

Mélinda Pierre-Paul Cardinal is a PhD student in Gender Studies at Queen’s University, specializing in Black studies, visual art, and literature. She holds a BFA and MA in Art History as well as a Graduate Diploma in Communications from Concordia University. Her research constellates the work of contemporary Black diasporic artists and writers that reimagine Black life boundlessly, beyond the logics of white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Adopting a Black feminist framework rooted in methods of opacity, she explores how reading such work across and alongside one another can reveal strategies for living Blackness differently in the still unfolding aftermaths of transatlantic slavery.

Marcela Torres Molano is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. She has a bachelor’s degree in architecture and a Master’s in urban design for development. With a keen interest in multidisciplinary research, Marcela focuses on the intersection of urban studies, community-based art, and feminisms. Her doctoral research investigates the work of Colombian women artists collaborating with communities to address violence arising from neoliberal and war environments. Besides her academic research, Marcela has worked in community-based urban design, education and art projects; all centered on advocating for gender and social justice.