Dr. Jaye Austin Williams is a critically acclaimed actor, director and playwright, as well as a scholar who specializes in the analysis of drama, cinema, performance, queer and feminist theories through critical Black study. Her research and teaching focus on the structural and global implications of antiblackness, and how their myriad, violent performances – both subtle and overt – emanate from the collective unconscious within global modernity. She received her MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU, and her PhD in Drama and Theatre, with a Critical Theory emphasis, from UC Irvine. Currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Dept. of Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University, she will join the faculty in the new Dept. of Black Study at the University of California, Riverside in fall 2025.
After her 30-year career in the professional theatre, Dr. Williams’ graduate study shifted her critical lens from theatre and drama to Black Study, within which the prior, along with cinema, have now become her objects of inquiry. Through Black Study as her critical practice, she continually reexamines the processes through which these aesthetic fields both reveal and occlude how antiblackness circulates dynamically and saturates the global sphere by way of the individual and collective (societal and institutional) unconscious drives which exact it.