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.

Bouchra Ouizguen, Corbeaux, September 24, 2017, Rice Park, St. Paul. Photo: Emmet Kowler

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. Pétigny’s research and writing is multimodal and exists at the intersections of Black feminist theory, Gender studies and Performance studies. 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, theorizes haunting and Black embodied aliveness as seeded within contemporary art and performance, and genealogies of Black feminist thought. This writing analyzes movement, aesthetic strategies, and literary legacies to seek after playful, unexpected, and suspended experiments with loss/absence in art and performance, marked by an infidelity to the project of re-dress and refusal to anchor Blackness in abjection. This writing develops a theory of haunting erotics as a Black femme and feminist methodology, and offers holding/embrace as a matrix that excavates the erotic from the abject. 

 Pétigny’s work has 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. Her research has been generously supported by the Steven J. Schochet Endowment for Queer, Trans and Sexuality Studies; the Race, Indigeneity, Gender & Sexuality Studies Center; and The Center on Women, Gender and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota, in addition to the Center for Complexity and Teaching and Learning Lab at RISD. 

Petigny is a 2026-2027 Teaching and Learning Lab Faculty Fellow and 2026-2027 Social Equity and Inclusion Decolonial Teaching in Action Fellow at RISD. From 2026-2028 she will join a cohort of her peers through the inaugural Brown/RISD Elemental Media Lab Fellowship. 

Petigny holds a BA in Women’s Studies and Sociology from Vassar College and a PhD in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota. 

Invited Research Residencies

  • Linden Place, Bristol, RI. Research residency. April 2025.

  • Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC), Tallahassee, FL  . Dance research residency. February 2023.

Fellowships

  • Teaching and Learning Lab Faculty Fellowship | RISD - 2026-2027

  • Elemental Media Lab Fellowship | Brown/RISD  - 2026-2028

  • Social Equity and Inclusion Decolonial Teaching in Action Fellow | RISD - 2026-2027

  • Leadership in Equity, Inclusion and Diversity Dissertation Fellowship | University of Minnesota - 2020-2021

  • Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship | University of Minnesota - 2019-2020

  • Mary Richardson and Lydia Pratt Babbott Fellowship for Graduate Study | Vassar College - 2019

  • Humphrey School of Public Affairs Graduate Research Partnership Program Fellowship | University of Minnesota - 2018

  • Steven J. Schochet Interdisciplinary Fellowship in Queer, Trans and Sexuality Studies | University of Minnesota - 2017-2018

  • Race, Indigeneity, Gender & Sexuality Initiative Comparative Race & Ethnicity Studies Summer Graduate Research Fellowship | University of Minnesota - 2017

Professional Organizations

  • Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars

  • Modern Language Association

  • American Studies Association

  • National Women’s Studies Association

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