Pembroke Center

Istifaa Ahmed is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies. They hold a BA from UC Berkeley in Ethnic Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies. Istifaa’s research looks to queer/trans of color performance, aesthetics, and speculative fictions for its disruption of colonial and transatlantic violence. Their work draws largely from queer of color critique, Black feminisms, women of color feminisms, performance studies, and queer inhumanisms. Her project is attuned to Black, Indigenous, and queer diasporic modes of creative practice and survivance across interspecies/elemental intimacies through conditions of historical dispossession. In so doing, they deeply consider what it means to be (in)human, erotic reconfigurations of being, and fugitive practice. Istifaa is thinking with the concept of porosity, as the space in between matter, to think through the permeability and in-between-ness across sites such as flesh, disease, conspiracy, and apocalypse as inhabitations and praxis of queer/trans of color life and precarity. Istifaa is also a filmmaker/artist and pursues collaborative and movement-based projects that center creative and sensorial modes of knowledge production.