Imani Wadud

Imani A. Wadud grew up in the D.C. Metropolitan area and is the mother of two. She’s organized and participated in feminist, antiracist, and immigrant rights initiatives during the ten years she lived in Regensburg, Germany where she received an M.A. in European-American Studies in 2015.

Currently, Imani is a doctoral student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Kansas and is a 2015 Chancellor Doctoral Fellow. Wadud’s current research is interdisciplinary in nature, primarily utilizing a black visual culture and performance studies lens. By choosing modes of inquiry that intersect with improvisation theory and oral history research methods, she situates her work alongside scholars who prioritize minoritized experiences in the U.S. through an anti-colonial approach in order to gauge how community-based and participatory projects can interrupt white supremacist visual imperatives locally, nationally and transnationally. How can discussions around what we see and hear animate analysis on Black liberation politics and the material effects of those processes outside of the academy? Imani continues to examine how art as non-oppositional contestation functions within civil society as a mode of social commentary and specifically how these types of projects are firmly rooted in populist aesthetic traditions.