Tao Leigh Goffe, PhD is the founder and Executive Director of Dark Laboratory. She is Associate Professor of cultural history and literary theory at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). She has worked in the past at institutions including Princeton University, Cornell University, Leiden University, New York University, and Johns Hopkins University. Her research is rooted in decolonial thought, literature, and theories of labor that center Black feminism’s engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations. Dr. Goffe did her undergraduate training at Princeton where she had a deep passion for molecular biology. She earned her doctorate from Yale University.

Board members

Dark Laboratory is grateful to the guidance of the advisory board, industry professionals, academics, advocates, and artists who have offered their expertise to help the lab in the execution of its mission: supporting Black and Indigenous art, creativity, and invention.

Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University

Professor Benjamin studies the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. She is the founder of the IDA B. WELLS Just Data Lab, the author of two books, People’s Science  (Stanford) and Race After Technology (Polity), and the editor of Captivating Technology (Duke).

Simone Browne, University of TExas, Austin

Professor Browne is the author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Simone is also a member of Deep Lab, a feminist collaborative composed of artists, engineers, hackers, writers, and theorists. She curates arts programming at the University of Texas at Austin on Black women’s creative engagement with surveillance.

Tamar Evangelestia Dougherty, Smithsonian

Tamar Evangelestia Dougherty is Director of the Smithsonian Institute Libraries and Smithsonian Archives in Washington, DC.

henry Louis Gates, JNr., Harvard University

Professor Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or co-authored twenty-one books and created fifteen documentary films, including Wonders of the African World, African American Lives, Faces of America, Black in Latin America, and Finding Your Roots on PBS. 

Stanley Nelson, Firelight Media

Stanley Nelson is an award-winning filmmaker and founder of Firelight Media. His latest film, Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, the definitive look at the life and career of the iconic Miles Davis, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019.

Fred Moten, New York University

Professor Moten teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and critical theory at Tisch. He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Moten is also co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.

Claudia Rankine, New York University

Professor Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays, including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; and is the editor of several anthologies, including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. She also co-produces a video series, “The Situation,” alongside John Lucas, and is the founder of the Open Letter Project: Race and the Creative Imagination.

Tracy Rector, Longhouse Media

Tracy Rector is a (Black, Choctaw, Jewish, French, Scottish and Irish) filmmaker, curator, community organizer, co-founder of Longhouse Media. She has made over 400 short films, and is currently in production of her fifth feature documentary. Rector has developed an awareness and sensitivity to the power of media and film as a modern storytelling tool. Her work has been featured on Independent Lens, Cannes Film Festival, ImagineNative, National Geographic’, Toronto International Film Festival, the Seattle Art Museum and in the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian.

Kamal Sinclair, The Music Center

Kamal Sinclair serves as External Advisor to MacArthur Foundation’s Journalism & Media Program and Creative Advisor to For Freedoms, MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality, Starfish Incubator, and Eyebeam. Previously, she was the Director of Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Labs Program, which supports artists working at the convergence of film, art, media and technology.

Tracy K. Smith, Harvard University

Professor Smith is the 22nd U.S. Poet Laureate and a Pulitzer Prize winner. She is the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor of English and African and African American Studies.

Circe Sturm, University of texas, Austin

Professor Sturm has spent her career trying to better understand how race shapes the lived experiences of Native and African American communities. She is a professor of Anthropology, the author of two award-winning books, Blood Politics (2002) and Becoming Indian (2011), and editor of Blackness and Indigeneity in the Light of Settler Colonial Theory (2020).

Eve Tuck, University of toronto

Professor Tuck teaches Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. Tuck's work is on urban education and Indigenous studies. She is Canada Research Chair of Indigenous Methodologies with Youth and Communities. She is Unangax̂ and is an enrolled member of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, Alaska.

Celeste Layne

Celeste is an architect and urban planner by training — software engineer by profession. She is one of the co-founders of Architechie, a community of professionals working at the intersection of architecture and technology. Celeste currently works as an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation where she teaches public interest technology and guides architects in the use of web technologies for creative pursuits while living on the Upper East Side of NYC. 

technologist | creative | educator | artist | community builder

Mimi Onuoha

Mimi is a Nigerian-American artist creating work about a world made to fit the form of data. By foregrounding absence and removal, her multimedia practice uses print, code, installation, and video to make sense of the power dynamics that result in disenfranchised communities' different relationships to systems that are digital, cultural, historical, and ecological. Mimi has been in residence at Studio XX (Canada), Data & Society Research Institute (USA), the Royal College of Art (UK), Eyebeam Center for Arts & Technology (USA), and Arthouse Foundation (Nigeria).

data | design | art | redaction| impossible maps

Tiffany Lethabo King

professor, University of Virginia

Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, her research is situated at intersections of slavery and indigenous genocide in the Americas. Professor King’s book The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2019) argues that scholarly traditions within Black Studies that examine Indigenous genocide alongside slavery in the Americas have forged ethical and generative engagements with Native Studies—and Native thought—that continue to reinvent the political imaginaries of abolition and decolonization. King is also co-editor of an anthology titled Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Black Racism (Duke University Press 2020). This collection of essays features leading scholars in the fields of Black and Indigenous Studies in order to stage a conversation between Black and Indigenous thought and politics on “otherwise” terms that are less mediated by conquest and settler-colonial logics.

Black Studies | Native Studies | Black geographies | American Studies | Gender&Sexuality

Tina Post

Professor, University of Chicago

Professor Post’s work is preoccupied with racial performativity, especially (though not exclusively) the ways that Black Americans perform racial identity. What modes of embodiment assert belonging or dis-belonging, and how? When do racialized subjects confirm and when do they subvert the expectations of their identitarian positions, and to what end? How do other factors of embodiment (gender, dis/ability, hybridity, and so forth) color these performances? She approaches such questions primarily through the lenses of affect and performance studies, using literature, visual culture, fine art, theater, and movement as examples and objects of study.

performance | visual art | rural ecologies | affect

Janne Salo

Cultural Designer, AALTO University, Finland

Janne is an independent designer specialising in cultural products, exhibitions, and workshop facilitation. He has worked with the National Museum of Finland, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Aalto University, Finnish Chamber of Commerce, and other Nordic organisations. He holds BAs in History of Art from Yale University and Design from Aalto University. Janne is currently completing his MA thesis in Collaborative and Industrial Design (Aalto University).

collaborative design | cultural design | disability justice | design philosophy | visual culture

Chandler Puritty

artist, tarot reader, educator

Professor Puritty has studied how our ever changing climate affects the interactions of native and invasive plant species in Southern California. While pursuing her doctorate in biology at the University of California, San Diego, she found a passion for equity and inclusion efforts and published a paper entitled "Without inclusion, diversity initiatives may not be enough" in the journal Science. Dr. Puritty is a doctoral lecturer in the African American Studies, Environmental Studies, and Culture, Art, and Technology departments at UCSD’s Scripps Institute of Oceanography and has taught in the Biology department at Howard University. She is also a professional artist and tarot card reader. Dr. Puritty is a graduate of Howard University in Washington DC where she majored in biology.

intersectionality | climate justice | decolonial science | tarot

Sydney Skybetter

Choreographer, Dean, Brown University

Hailed by Dance Magazine as “one of the most influential people in dance today,” Professor Skybetter’s choreography has been performed at such venues as The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Jacob’s Pillow and The Joyce Theater. A sought-after speaker, he has lectured on the relationship of dance history to emerging surveillance technologies at Harvard, South by Southwest Interactive, Yale, Mozilla, and Stanford. He is Deputy Dean of the Curriculum  at Brown University where he has tenure and researches the problematics of human computer interfaces and mixed reality systems, and is the founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces. Professor Skybetter is the recipient of a joint Creative Capital award.

embodied intelligence | choreographics | surveillance | gesture | meanings at scale

BEN PLATT

Editor

Ben Platt is senior editor and global coordinator at Public Books. Previously a book editor at Basic Books and Penguin Press, they are currently the director of the community speaker series SHELTER. In 2018, they were a keynote speaker at the Object Lessons Institute, a writing workshop for scholars and nonfiction writers sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Ben is a graduate of the University of Chicago, and lives in Brooklyn.

publishing | literary coteries | settler colonialism | antiquity | object analysis

ARIELLA AZOULAY

professor, BRown University

A Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University, film essayist and curator of archives and exhibitions, Her most recent book is titled Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019). Professor Azoulay’s recent exhibition Errata (in retro-prospect) is part of a broader project that explores the entanglement of patterns of (force) migration of objects and people, and the reparative potentialities of thinking them together. 

imperialism | (force)migration | Algeria, Arab-Jewish | stolen transmissions | objects | Indigeneity | errata in retro-prospect

Joshua Bennett

professor, Poet, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Professor Bennett is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative nonfiction: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)—winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Owed (Penguin, 2020), The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022), and Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023). He is Professor of English and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT.

abolition | affect theory | Black study | ecocriticism | poetics

Amber Starks

advocate, organizer, cultural critic, decolonial theorist, and abolitionist, Curator-at-large (Digital Junkanoo)

Amber Starks (aka Melanin Mvskoke; she/her) is an Afro-Indigenous (African American and Native  American) advocate, organizer, cultural critic, decolonial theorist, and budding abolitionist. She is an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and is also of Shawnee, Yuchi, Quapaw, and  Cherokee descent. 

Her passion is the intersection of Black and Native American identity. Her activism seeks to  normalize, affirm, and uplift the multidimensional identities of Black and Native peoples through discourse and advocacy around anti-Blackness, abolishing blood quantum, Black liberation, and Indigenous sovereignty. She earned her B.S. in General Science with an emphasis in Biology and Anthropology) at the University of Oregon.

She hopes to encourage Black and Indigenous peoples to prioritize one another and divest from  compartmentalizing struggles. She ultimately believes the partnerships between Black and  Indigenous peoples (and all POC) will aid in the dismantling of anti-blackness, white supremacy, and settler colonialism, globally.   

Black and Indigenous identity | decolonial theories | multidimensional identities

Keolu Fox

Professor, University of California, San Diego

Keolu Fox, Ph.D., Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) is Assistant Professor at University of California, San Diego, affiliated with the Department of Anthropology, the Global Health Program, the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, the Climate Action Lab, and the Indigenous Futures Lab. He holds a Ph.D. in Genome Sciences from the University of Washington, Seattle (2016). Dr. Fox’s multi-disciplinary research interests include genome sequencing, genome engineering, computational biology, evolutionary genetics, paleogenetics, and Indigenizing biomedical research. His primary research focuses on questions of functionalizing genomics, testing theories of natural selection by editing genes and determining the functions of mutations.

Dr. Fox is a recipient of grants from numerous organizations including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, the American Association for Physical Anthropology, Emerson Collective, the Social Science Research Council and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, SOLVE Initiative.

Indigenous futurist technologies | murmurations | surfing | island soundtracks | land back | regenerative agriculture

Matt Hooley

professor, Dartmouth College

Matt Hooley is Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Dartmouth College. He writes and teaches at the intersection of American, Colonialism, Environmental, and Indigenous Studies and is working on two book projects: Infrastructures of Belonging: Native Modernism and U.S. Cultures of Extraction and Drought Colonialism: The Aesthetics of Settler Environmentalism. He received his PhD in Literary and Indigenous Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has taught at Texas Tech University, UCLA, Clemson, and Tufts University. 

comparative colonialisms | cultures of extraction | decolonial poetics | land | modernism

Leanna Humphrey

Architect, Professor, Hampton University

A graduate of Cornell University (2022) where she received her master’s degree in architecture, Professor Humphrey specializes in topics of representation and computing. She is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Hampton University. She is interested in rethinking current models of architectural practice and pedagogies, in particular through multi-disciplinary approaches and connections with emerging technologies. Her past experience ranges from roles as a project manager and architect to public interest research and design education. She received her bachelor of architecture from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, where her thesis work experimented with questions of spatial inhabitation through scenographic models and drawings.

utopia | digital haunting | pedagogy

Waylon Wilson

Cornell University, Performing and Media Arts,

Waylon Wilson is a citizen of the Tuscarora Nation focused on re-storying Indigenous history and issues in multiple media platforms. As a digital media artist, he is relocating Indigenous place-based knowledge as mobile, virtual environments, laser-cut fabrications, and quirky animations. He builds interactive, intergenerational digital spaces for elder and youth play. As a PhD student, his current research interests examine the intersections of Indigenous storytelling, documentary filmmaking, cinema techniques, and video game strategies.

artist | video games | actor | VR | film

Aree Worawongwasu

community Organizer, University of Hawai’i, EThnic Studies

Areerat (Aree) Worawongwasu is a Mon Teochew Thai organizer, educator, and cultural worker. She is committed to ancestral healing practices and envisioning just futures of Black and Indigenous solidarities. She is currently pursuing her PhD in American Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, where she is TA’ing for Indigenous Studies courses.

futurisms | decolonization | abolition | demilitarization | Afro-Asia

JESSE SGAMBATI

Composer-in-Residence

Jesse is a 25 year old Black, trans artist from New York. Born in New Orleans and raised in Syracuse they attended NYU to study music production, songwriting and music business. They sit on the Transformative Justice Committee for COLAGE and organization that provides programming for youth with one or more LGBTQ parents/guardians. Jesse is passionate about social activism specifically as it relates to the intersections of race and gender identity. Jesse currently resides in Manhattan.

music| production | design

Tatyana Tandanpolie

lab manager, journalist

Tatyana is a journalist and writer born and based in Columbus, Ohio. She is the Lab Manager of Dark Lab as well as the Managing Editor of the Dark Lab initiative, Digital Junkanoo. A recent New York University graduate, she double majored in Journalism and Africana Studies and strove to amplify marginalized voices, particularly that of Black women and queer folk, in her stories and research. Her recent research interests involve African and diasporic traditional religions and Afro-descendants' adoption of them as an assertion of identity and a mode of remembering.

writing | rituals | foodways | literary infrastructure | African diaspora

Justin lowe

Composer-in-Residence

Justin graduated from the College of Arts & Sciences at Cornell pursuing a double major in Economics and Biology & Society. He hails from Kingston, Jamaica, and has a keen interest in creating a unique nexus between the social sciences and physical sciences in his academic pursuits. He is also a professional steelpan soloist and has a decade of experience in performing live music. 

Jamaican Chinese | music | nature | humanity | knowledge production

Maria Aguirre

Intern

Princeton University, Rising Junior, Sociology, Minor: Computer Science and Portuguese

Maria is an intern for the Dark Laboratory. She is passionate about understanding structures and how they affect people. Growing up in the vibrant and diverse community of Southeast San Diego (Kumeyaay Territory), she witnessed firsthand challenges faced by marginalized communities. She has a keen interest in computing and learning new languages in relation to colonial encounter. Her passion has been ignited as well by studying abroad in Portugal and Cape Verde. Maria is interested in multimodal creative technologies. With a vision and mission for social justice, she is excited to work beyond academic or professional pursuits, on personal geographies and weaving stories.

People Centered / Impactful/ Message / Intentional / Community

Kendall Greene

Intern, artist

Amherst College, Rising Senior, Practice of Art

Kendall is the summer intern for Afro-Asia Group and will assist with the activities of Kitchen Marronage. They are an artist born and based in Atlanta, Georgia (unceded territories of Muscogee and Cherokee peoples) interested in rooting people back to themselves and their ecosystems. The values that inform their practice are inspired by a Black feminist love ethic and honor the cyclical nature of our bodies. Their art serves as a reminder that we are not separate from nature, but active participants in the rhythm of life. They experiment mainly with film photography because the practice allows them to explore the boundaries of time.  In addition to being an artist, they are a convener, having hosted many jam sessions and potlucks. Their work confronts themes of climate catastrophe and salvation.

Eco-feminism, Black liberation, Food sovereignty, community resilience, care ethics

Ariana white

intern, singer

Fordham University, Rising Sophomore, Natural Sciences with a concentration in Cellular and Molecular Biology & Disability Studies Minor (Intended)

Ariana is an intern for the Dark Laboratory. Based in Lenapehoking, she has completed independent research in both environmental biology and Afro-Caribbean cultural history, and strives to tackle intersectional systemic issues through research and storytelling. Her passion for ecology has been sparked by learning with communities about agriculture in the Catskills and in Ecuador. Ariana is interested in Black diaspora masquerade traditions and will be assisting with activities in Dark Lab’s design and curatorial studio Digital Junkanoo. She was formerly an editor of a satire journal.

Ecology | Independent Research |
Systemic Justice | Intersectional | Equity

• Legal and literary infrastructure

• Choreography, Philosophy, gesture

• DJ’ing, Sonic Sculpture, technology