Scholar and artist based in Brooklyn, NY.
Photo Credit: © Shine Portrait Studio (Anthony Alvarez/Nick Kline)
ABOUT
Christina Knight is Assistant Professor of Art History as well as the Mellon Assistant Professor of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in African American Studies with a primary field in the History of Art. Before joining the Rutgers faculty, she was the founding director and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Haverford College, a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at Bowdoin College as well as a Ford Foundation Diversity Fellow. Knight’s work examines the connection between embodied practices and identity, the relationship between race and the visual field, and the queer imaginary. She is currently completing a book manuscript that focuses on representations of the Middle Passage in contemporary American visual art and performance. Knight is also at work on a new project that examines the influences of drag culture on contemporary black art. Additionally, she is the director of knightworks dance theater, which she co-founded with her sister in 2013.
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Research Interests
African American art, contemporary art, black American performance, black popular culture, queer performance and visual culture, histories of slavery, and the arts and culture of the African Diaspora.
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Publications and Convenings
You can find Knight’s 2024 interview on the Black Studies Podcast here. You can find her review of the 2023 exhibition Sue Williamson & Lebohang Kganye: Tell Me What You Remember at Barnes Foundation here and a 2023 conversation on the legacy of American sculptor William Edmondson with curator James Claiborne and artist Brendan Fernandes here. You can find an interview on ancestral work in art and scholarship along with artist Nia O. Witherspoon, conducted by ASAP/J’s Jonathon P. Eburne here. Knight’s catalog essay titled, “New World or no world: Middle Passage as Arrival” for the 2021 exhibition Arrivals at Katonah Museum of Art can be found here. Other scholarly publications can be found at American Literary History Online, Nka: Journal of African Art, ASAP/J, The Black Scholar and CAA Reviews. You can find an interview that Knight conducted with black studies icon and poet Sonia Sanchez in Boston Review’s 2021 collection Ancestors. You can learn about Knight’s recent working group After Capitalism, What? here, and her symposium The Black Extra/ordinary here. For talks organized for the Haverford campus community look here and here.
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Art Making
knightworks dance theater is comprised of two sisters: choreographer Jessi Knight and director/writer Christina Knight. Founded in 2013, knightworks makes interdisciplinary dance theater works centered on telling stories of the African Diaspora in rich, layered detail. The company is currently completing the third work in a trilogy on the idea of “the end of the world.” Support for the trilogy has come from Duke University, Spelman College, Bowdoin College, Haverford College, Rutgers University, Newark and the University of Pennsylvania. knightworks gave a talk about their short film, doomsday: field notes as part of Christina’s fellowship through the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. Additionally, Black Speculative Futures, the class the sisters co-taught at Penn in Fall of 2020, was featured in 34th Street Magazine. You can find Christina’s interview with the CAMRA Penn podcast about embodiment and the speculative here.