After graduating from Wesleyan University with an honors thesis on Harlem drag ball performance, Tavia Nyong’o was a Marshall scholar to the University of Birmingham’s (UK) Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. He then earned a doctorate in American Studies at Yale, studying under Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach, and taught for a decade at Tisch School of Arts, New York University’s Department of Performance Studies before returning to Yale in 2016. He was born in the Midwest and raised there and in the Republic of Kenya.
Email: tavia.nyongo@yale.edu