NAIMAH ZULMADELLE PÉTIGNY (she/her) is a Black feminist scholar, dancer, poet, and abolitionist educator. She’s an Assistant Professor of Literary Arts and Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and holds the Schiller Family Assistant Professorship in Race in Art and Design. Born and raised in Northampton, MA, Naimah’s work is shaped by her experiences as a youth organizer, racial justice facilitator, and dancer in professional ensembles. Naimah writes toward expansive, experimental notions of Blackness as she centers questions of gender, pastness, loss, and erotics. Her first book project, The Hold is also An Embrace: Haunting and Black Erotic Life explores Black embodied aliveness as seeded within contemporary art and performance, and Black feminist theory. This work analyzes movement, aesthetics strategies, and literary legacies to think through sites of loss, absence, and abjection which dually embody Black aliveness. She’s been published in Commoning Ethnography, The Walker Art Center Magazine, Agitate! Unsettling Knowledges Journal, Routledge International Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies, and Cultural Studies. Naimah holds a BA in Women’s Studies and Sociology from Vassar College and a PhD in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota.