Misty De Berry
Assistant Professor
Interdisciplinarity is a touchstone to my work as an academic and artist. I began my training in the academy in an arts conservatory where I studied classical acting and dance-movement theatre. My subsequent creative scholarship and practice led me to extensive training in Transformative Justice across the greater Chicago metropolitan area, specific to Black & Afro-Caribbean queer communities navigating repair after encounters with gender-based violence. My turn to theoretical practice has thus been intimately shaped by an organic amalgamation of methods, analytics, and conceptual frameworks.
My scholarship, service, and arts practice thus centers wisdom inherited primarily from black feminist thought, queer of color critique, performance and black critical theory, along with studies in transformative justice and disability studies. I am currently working on my first manuscript, In Due Time: Performance and the Psychic Life of Black Debt, which explores routine modes of debt and indebtedness in the lives of black queer femmes, and their engagement with time-based media and durational gestures to dismantle such routines. My most resent performance, little sister: an Afro-Temporal Solo-Play, tells the story of a nomadic child spirit who shape-shifts across several incarnations of Afro-Caribbean queer women—spanning the Antebellum South to present moment Chicago.
My ongoing creative and community practice engages an interplay between core conceptual aspects, aesthetic musings, and practical lines of flight taken up in my critical research. Currently I am serving as co-founder and co-director of "Promiscuous Care and Performance," a national humanities institute housed at Dartmouth College that centers scholars, artists, and activists working across the fields of performance studies, disability justice, and Black & Afro-Caribbean Feminist thought.