Graduate Student

Karina Karbo-Wright

Karina Karbo-Wright (she/they) has been invested in Black studies and film/media work for the past eight years through various scholarly, professional, and community-centered capacities. As a Black queer person who grew up in South Minneapolis, Karina’s passion for Black cultural and media studies only flourished in the African American Studies Department at Northwestern University, where she graduated with honors in 2022. Following graduation and her published thesis on the Black Horror Genre, Karina worked as a DEI professional for two years before attending UC Berkeley. They are...

Nejat Kedir

Doctoral Candidate

Nejat Kedir earned her BA and MA from University of Washington Bothell. She majored in American Studies as an undergrad and completed her MA on Cultural Studies.

Research interests: Black geography, Black feminism and critical race theory

Akweley Mazarae Lartey

Akweley Mazarae Lartey (he/xe/dey) is a doctoral student in the Department of African American & African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. Deir research interests span Black queer and trans studies, kinship studies, deaf studies, and storytelling. As a hard-of-hearing second-generation Ghanaian American and African American, xe is interested in exploring silences in archives, particularly for Black gender-expansive people and Black Deaf families, and how histories are passed down from various modes of storytelling.

A Black queer jawn originally from the Greater Philadelphia Area...

Chantel Eboni McCrea

Chantel Eboni McCrea (she/they/he) is a scholar of deeply invested in Black diaspora studies and in particular, their intersections with Gender and Sexuality Studies. This investment has led Chantel to be an abolitionist educator, activist, and organizer for over 10 years now from 6th grade until the present. Her initial interest in this was only further nurtured by her time in the Black Studies, Gender and Sexuality, and Performance Studies departments at Northwestern University where she completed various research projects ranging from archival research on...

Charlie Pollard-Durodola

Doctoral Student

Charlie “eon” Pollard-Durodola is a scholar of black ungendered life who comes to the department by way of UCLA Law where they earned a JD specializing in Critical Race Studies. During their time in law school, Charlie was an Articles Editor for the UCLA Law Review. In coming to this department, Charlie is interested in continuing their work regarding legality, desire, and antiblackness. Their first publication Deadly Desires: The Juridical Birth of Queer Humanism Amidst Slavery’s Afterlife, is soon to be published in the UCLA Law Review. Their other scholarly interests...

Endria Richardson

Doctoral Student

Endria Isa Richardson is a gay black and Malaysian scholar, writer, and lawyer. Endria’s work explores speculative literature as a site for the development and popular dissemination of critical philosophies of race, black phenomenology, decolonial thought, and theories of radical black utopianism. In conversation with thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Eduard Glissant, and José Esteban Muñoz, Endria’s work explores the underlying epistemologies that facilitate and hinder the realization of black utopian ideas in the real spaces of...

Kevin Rigby Jr.

Doctoral Candidate

Kevin Rigby Jr. is a PhD Candidate in the Department of African American Studies. His research interests include critical philosophies of race, political philosophy, and critical social movement studies. His dissertation theorizes the relationship between black political demands and the political as such, by interrogating responses to the Black Lives Matter movement. He earned a BA in African American Studies from Wayne State University, and completed a post-baccalaureate research program at Yale University before arriving at Berkeley.

Traveon Rogers

“Houston-native Traveon Dinell Rogers is a musician, performing artist, photographer and budding filmmaker who draws inspiration from thought-provoking, authentic representations of culture through multimedia content. Armed with a passionate conviction that stages and screens of all sizes are today’s most powerful educational tools, Traveon demonstrates that scholarly endeavors can be explored beyond libraries, lecture halls, and books.

Their interests and artistic ventures are creative as they are intellectual and methodical. While living Mexico, he involved...

Irene Denise Ross

Zana Sanders

Doctoral Student

Zana Sanders is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of Black studies, film, and media studies. She earned a B.A. in Film and Media and M.A. in African American Studies from Georgia State University. Currently, Zana is a Berkeley Fellow and doctoral student in the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores the visual representation of (anti)Blackness across the diaspora in film, digital media, news, art and popular culture.

Broadly, Zana’s research interests include performances of...