Research Bio

Dora Silva Santana is an artist and a scholar. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled “Iconica: transing afro diasporic signs” in which she argues that, for black trans people, images that populate our art, imaginary, stories, and other forms of media correspond with actions for transformative living, whose meanings have been dislocated or erased by colonialism. She draws from multisited visual archives, critical memoir passages and translinguistic sources from the African diaspora, mainly from the global south.

Research Expertise and Interest

Black trans studies, Black queer and trans feminist theory, global south epistemologies, Black poets, visual culture - media - and technology