Troizel Carr

According to Troizel, "NYU PS sometimes feels like a cabin of misfits in a fold, a band of people who can’t seem to fit in any other place. It feels good to finally have found a place where people think like you and don’t think you’re strange because of the kinds of things you want to think together." 

PS became an ideal home for Troizel after he completed studying Theater Studies and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Emory University. During that time, he was accepted into the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF), which prepares students from racially underrepresented communities in the academy for careers in the professoriate. There he wrote an undergraduate honors thesis entitled “Failure in Excess, Desire in Abundance: The Aesthetic Queering of Black Masculinity and Performative Utopias,” where they tried to work through black masculinity as a space characterized by a potentially productive double failure thus already marking it as anti-normative and queer

Troizel's final project was called "untitled (how does it feel?)" and according to him it, "was a really baroque and serpentine meditation on the aesthetics of black being as situated between unbearable violence and orgasmic pleasure through Barry Jenkins' film Moonlight, the Netflix show Sense8, and Toni Morrison's Beloved."

"I decided to apply (only!) to PS because I felt like the questions I wanted to ask were conceived here so I could only imagine their life here. I'm sure most people applying from the M.A. feel that way, but I didn't know in what other laboratory I could keep my cobbled project together. I sometimes feel like this department was made specifically for me or who I would become; it's like one taste of the Performance Studies juice, and you're hooked. The rigor, the commitment, the care for the work is so utterly different here. It's in a different groove."

Troizel currently holds a teaching fellowship at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, where he finds that the tools and modes of analysis used in this performance studies courses have proven helpful to facilitate conversations with the general public about what art does and can do.

Black studies, Black queer studies, African Diasporic art history, aesthetic theory, pop cultural studies, folklore/fairy tale studies, political philosophy.