I am an Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Departments of English and Gender Studies at UCLA, where I serve as the incoming Chair of the LGBT Studies Minor. I teach a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses, including Critical Approaches to Race and Ethnicity in Performance, Ways of Reading Race, Approaches to American Cultures, Queer and Feminist Theories, Epistemologies of Gender, & Interdisciplinary American Studies.

I am a cultural historian and contemporary art writer. I am broadly interested in African diasporic artistic production, specifically visual art and performance cultures. My research is a synthesis of methods drawn from literature and creative writing, ethnic studies, affect theory, queer and feminist theory, theater and performance studies, and art history, among others.

By combining archival research and a spacious, ever-evolving set of analytical methods, my work reframes understudied cultural actors as the architects of pathbreaking visual art and performance-based works and as the protagonists in compelling cultural histories that tell new stories. 

I am the author of Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (NYU Press, 2015), the first comprehensive study of Black women’s performance art. It was awarded three book prizes: the William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of African American Literature and Culture from the Modern Language Association, the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theater History, and the Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African American Theater and Drama, both from the American Society for Theater Research.

My second book, Mavericks of Style: The Seventies in Color, is under contract with Duke University Press (forthcoming, 2025). It traces how three protagonists—illustrator Antonio Lopez, model Grace Jones, fashion designer Stephen Burrows—and their like-minded peers collectively explored new aesthetic forms and blurred the edges between disciplines while living and working in 1970s New York City. Focusing on these roving artistic networks, I illuminate aesthetic interventions staged in department stores, hair salons, discos, and artist studios that evade hierarchies between high and low forms and traverse the line between uptown and downtown. At once a cultural history and queer visual archive, I trace the aesthetic signature of style across fashion, visual art, and performance.

In addition, my essays have been published in select academic journals and several edited collections, including Trans History in 99 Objects (2024), Edges of Ailey (Whitney Museum, 2024), Simone Leigh (ICA Boston, 2023), Christina Quarles (MOCA, 2020), The Routledge Companion to African American Art History (2019), and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985: New Perspectives (Brooklyn Museum, 2018).

Most recently, my research has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, which awarded me a 2023 Art Writers Grant, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where I was the Walter Jackson Bate fellow for the 2021-22 academic year.

I received my Ph.D. from the joint American Studies and African-American Studies program at Yale University, where my dissertation received the Sylvia Boone Prize for best-written work by a graduate student in African-American Art History. 

Read Uri’s Essays