Sage Ni’Ja Whitson, Professor (they/them) – is an international multiple award-winning Queer Transgender artist, writer, and medicine worker, noted by Brooklyn Magazine as a culture influencer and the Park Avenue Amory as a “trailblazing XR artist to know”. They are a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Visual Arts Fellow, Herb Alpert/MacDowell Fellow, United States Artist Fellow, Creative Capital and two-time “Bessie” Awardee who engages anti-disciplinarity through a critical intersection of the sacred and conceptual in science, technology, and art. Their multi-form works on dark matter and dark energy, via The Unarrival Experiments, have been commissioned across the world and media, including recently at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Black Speculative Arts Movement – Denver, and an upcoming solo exhibition at the California African American Museum. Their manuscript, Transtraterrestrial: Dark Matter and Black Divinities is slated to be published by Wesleyan University Press, November 2025. Whitson is a sought-after speaker, consultant, presenter, and masterclass facilitator, whose offerings have been shared among notable institutions and arts organizations: CRCI/Brown Arts Institute, Princeton, Cornell, LAX Festival, Movement Research, 2020 keynote of the Collegium for African Diasporic Dance conference, and UNESCO. Sage Ni’Ja Whitson served as the inaugural chair of the Department of Black Study from 2023-2025.
Whitson is on fellowship leave until August 2026.
