Ianna Hawkins Owen

Biography

Ianna earned her BA in Africana Studies from CUNY Hunter College where she graduated as the valedictorian in 2008. While at Hunter she was a Mellon Mays fellow, a Macaulay Honors scholar, organized with a popular education activist group called All City, and worked for the anti- police and hate violence working group of the Audre Lorde Project. Ianna received her MA in African American Studies from UC Berkeley. Under the direction of Darieck Scott, Ianna is completing her dissertation, Ordinary Failures: Toward a Diasporan Ethics, for the PhD in African Diaspora Studies. Her essay, “On the Racialization of Asexuality” appears in the edited volume Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives(Routledge, 2014); she is also the co-author of “Creating Outside Agitators” in Reclamations (UC Berkeley, 2010). In 2014-2015 she served as the editor and designer of Insurgency: The Black Matter(s) Issue, a special issue of The Diaspora responding to the #blacklivesmatter movement. Ianna’s graduate study is supported by the Ford Foundation, the Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. She is also the recipient of the VéVé Clark Student Excellent Award (2014) and the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award for LGBT Studies (2015). In her spare time Ianna enjoys playing board games, reading poetry, and studying Welsh.