Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. Her books and articles traverse several disciplines and interdisciplines, but one through-line is an abiding interest in exploring how feelings are lived, experienced, and communicated between and across bodies—and with what risks and possibilities for self and others. Another is the work of the aesthetic for disrupting and transforming possibilities for democratic social life.

They are the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (Routledge, 1997); co-author, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (NYU Press, 2003; Beacon Press, 2004); and co-author, with Michael Bronski and Michael Amico, of “You Can Tell Just By Looking” and 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon Press, 2013). “You Can Tell Just By Looking” was a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Non-Fiction. She is currently completing a new book on “queer structures of religious feeling.” 

Pellegrini has published two anthologies: Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, co-edited with Daniel Boyarin and Danial Itzkovitz (Columbia University Press, 2003); and Secularisms, co-edited with Janet R. Jakobsen (Duke University Press, 2008). She is founding co-editor, with José Muñoz, of the “Sexual Cultures” Series, at New York University Press, which she now co-edits with Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o.

Pellegrini is a licensed psychoanalyst. They and Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou received the first Tiresias Paper Award, in 2021, from the International Psychoanalytic Association for their co-written paper: “A feminine boy: normative investments and reparative fantasy at the intersections of gender, race, and religion.”