Daniel Coleman
Assistant Professor Affiliate Faculty/Africana Studies Africana Studies, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies- Education
PhD in Communication Studies (Performance Studies), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2017
MA in Theatre Arts (Performance Studies), San Jose State University, 2011
BA in Latin American Studies, California State University, East Bay, 2008
- Specializations
• Black, trans, and decolonial feminisms, Black trans studies
• Performance studies, oral history performance, Performance As Research, cultural studies, ecosomatics
• Afro-diasporic and Native/Indigenous ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, and quantum physics
• Africana thought in the Americas; Afro-futurism
• Decolonial pedagogies
• Native/Indigenous cosmologies in Southern Mexico, Afro-diasporic cosmologies, Africana Esoteric Studies (AES)
• Political and artistic movement work for/by women, queer, trans, Black, and Native/Indigenous people
- Biography
Dr. Daniel Coleman (he/they) is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Affiliate Faculty Member in Africana Studies. Dr. Coleman is a performance artist, dancer/choreographer, poet, and transdisciplinary artist-scholar who prioritizes both performance mediums and written scholarship.
Dr. Coleman's first book, Refusals and Reinventions: Engendering New Black and Indigenous Life Across the Americas, was published by the Ohio State University Press in 2024. In Refusals and Reinventions, artist-scholar-organizer Daniel Coleman considers his critical trajectories and participation in intersectional justice struggles in the US and Mexico, situating them within larger abolitionist and decolonial movements for Black civil rights and Native/Indigenous sovereignty. He identifies how Black and Indigenous people create, exist in, and reclaim many worlds—the pluriverse—through their artistic refusals and reinventions. Coleman thus contributes to a growing body of pluriversal thought, inspired by the Zapatista motto “a world in which many worlds fit.” Charting previously unrecognized connections among the creative struggles of Indigenous people in southern Mexico and Black people in the southern United States, Coleman draws on performance praxis, decolonial pedagogies, and Afro-diasporic and Native/Indigenous cosmologies to frame four case studies of people refusing racialized, gendered violences as world-making tools. In looking at creative responses among activists in Chiapas and North Carolina, Coleman uses transfeminist, Black feminist, and decolonial frameworks to ask: How do creative insurgent practices give us access to our humanity? And what do praxis and engaged witnessing have to teach us about what worlds from the pluriverse hold?
Dr. Coleman’s other publications appear in Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic, Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy, and Purpose, Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy, and Purpose, The Black Trans Prayer Book, and in The Black Scholar, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Queer Studies and Communication, and Geographies of Us: An Ecosomatic/s Reader.