Naimah Petigny

Naimah Zulmadelle Pétigny is a Black feminist scholar, dancer, and educator. Born and raised in Northampton, MA, Naimah makes work shaped by her experiences as a youth organizer, racial justice facilitator, and dancer in professional ensembles. Her research and writing is multimodal and exists at the intersections of Black feminist theory, gender studies, and performance studies. Naimah writes toward expansive, experimental notions of Blackness as she centers questions of gender, pastness, loss, and erotics. 

Her first book project, The Hold is also an Embrace: Haunting and Black Erotic Life, theorizes haunting and Black embodied aliveness as seeded within contemporary art and performance and genealogies of Black feminist thought. This writing analyzes movement, aesthetic strategies, and literary legacies to seek after playful, unexpected, and suspended experiments with loss/absence in art and performance, marked by an infidelity to the project of re-dress. 

Naimah’s work has been published in Commoning Ethnography, The Walker Art Center Magazine, Agitate! Unsettling Knowledges Journal, Routledge International Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies, and Cultural Studies. Her research has been generously supported by the Steven J. Schochet Endowment for Queer, Trans and Sexuality Studies; the Race, Indigeneity, Gender & Sexuality Studies Center; and The Center on Women, Gender and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota, in addition to the Center for Complexity and Teaching and Learning Lab at RISD. 

She is a 2026–27 Teaching and Learning Lab faculty fellow and a 2026–7 Social Equity & Inclusion Decolonial Teaching in Action fellow at RISD. From 2026–28 she will join a cohort of her peers through the inaugural Brown/RISD Elemental Media Lab Fellowship. She holds a BA in Women’s Studies and Sociology from Vassar College and a PhD in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota.