Fred Moten

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Fred Moten is Professor in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature, where he teaches courses in black study, poetics and critical theory. He works with lots of social and aesthetic study groups including Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, the Black Arts Movement School Modality, Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective, the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, Moved by the Motion, the Institute of Physical Sociality and the Harris/Moten Quartet.

Why PS @ NYU?

Performance Studies at NYU is the unofficial department of the neighborhood. We study lots of things voraciously and with as little regard to category as possible, but it all seems to come back to the stuff that a bunch of deep and interesting people – Allan Kaprow, Jonas Mekas, William Parker, Ellen Stewart, Anne Waldman, Samuel R. Delany, John Yau, José Munoz, Diane Di Prima, David Wojnarowicz, Jill Johnston, Yoko Ono, Hettie Jones, Thelonious Monk, Marsha P. Johnson, etc. – were doing and seeing and thinking within a stone’s throw of 721 Broadway.

AWARDS/FELLOWSHIPS/HONORS

My book Perennial Fashion Presence Falling was a semifinalist for the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Corresponding Fellow, The British Academy, 2023.

Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2022.

 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, 2020.

Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin, 2020.

United States Artist Rockefeller Fellow, 2018.

Roy Lichtenstein Award, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, 2018.

Recent Publications

the blacksmiths, the flowers, with Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver, Reading Group Records, 2024.

What is your favorite museum/gallery and why?

"The best gallery in the world is pretty much any street in the world. You won’t have to wait too long to see something deep and/or beautiful and/or disturbing and/or unbearable, and then your mind will be ringing with the questions that won’t go away – how’s all this go together? what are we doing?" - Fred Moten