About
Dr. Ayasha C. Guerin (they/she) is assistant professor of intersectionality and practice-based research and media making in the department of World Arts & Cultures/ Dance. They are an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose research and creative practices center socio-ecological histories,connecting human and animal experience through questions of relational reciprocity, care and companionship across Black diasporic contexts and anti-colonial struggles.
Professor Guerin’s first book project, Making Zone A, Nature, Race and Resilience on New York’s Most Vulnerable Shores looks at the colonial foundations of the city’s waterfront development from the 17th-19th century and traces how conquest, slavery, and capitalism have physically altered coastal environments and ecological relations. This work joins important intellectual developments to think through Native American and African American experience, human and species distinctions, and settler colonialism and antiblackness together. It treats the shoreline as important material, historical record of racial and animal (un)settlement.
Dr. Guerin holds a PhD from New York University in American Studies.
Publications (Articles)
“Matter and Memory: Black Feminist Poetics and Performance in Berlin, Germany”
Meridians: feminism, race transnationalism. Vol 22, April 2023
“Shared routes of mammalian kinship: Race and migration in Long Island whaling diasporas.”
Nomadic identities, archipelagic movements, and island diasporas: a special section of Island Studies Journal, 15(2), May 2021, pp. 43-61
“Underground and at Sea: Oysters and Black Marine Entanglements in New York’s Zone-A.”
Special issue on coloniality and islands: Shima, 13(2), October 2019, pp. 30-55
Expertise
American studies, Black diaspora studies, social and cultural analysis, colonialism and anticolonial resistance, race and public space, environmental history, urban ecology and coastal geography, island and archipelago studies, ocean and animal studies, queer art and literature.
Creative Practice and Research
Dr. Guerin brings two decades of photography, video, and performance arts practices. They have shared creative work and research in exhibitions at the Museum of the City of New York, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Center for Performance Research, New Museum’s IdeasCity, MoMA PS1, the Berlin Biennale and the Kölnischer Kunstverein, among other venues. They regularly accept invitations to present art and research at academic institutes, art galleries and museums.
Since 2020, Dr. Guerin has been a member of the Berlin-based research collective curating through conflict with care (CCC), which uses conflict and contradiction as methodology for identifying and revealing the paradoxes of inclusive curating and understands them as jumping off points for advancing best practices and existing debates around curatorial responsibility.
In 2023, Dr. Guerin founded the Liberated Planet Studio (LPS) at The Dance Centre, which provides free studio space and workshop programs for artists and activists interested in ecological research, somatic methodologies and movement practices to mobilize discourse about the intersections of environmental and social exploitation and intercultural struggles for socio-ecological liberation. At UCLA, Dr. Guerin offers a Liberated Planet Studio graduate seminar and continues to co-develop the program with artist-collaborators