Working at the intersection of performance, visual culture, and literature, Bimbola Akinbola’s scholarly and creative work is concerned with conceptions of belonging and queer worldmaking in African diasporic cultural production. Akinbola is currently working on her first book manuscript, which examines the creative work of contemporary Nigerian diasporic women artists whose work, she argues, strategically utilizes disbelonging as a critical tool and strategy for queer worldmaking. As a scholar of museums and material culture, Akinbola has also written about the museum space as a site of dissent, and the race, class, and gender politics of “community engaged” programming. Her teaching interests include theories of diaspora, African diasporic cultural production, tools and strategies for creating performance, critical museum studies, and feminist and queer art and performance.

In addition to her scholarly work, Akinbola is a practicing visual artist and has worked on a number of performance-based projects exploring Blackness, memory, and erasure in collaboration with dance companies, universities, and independent choreographers across the U.S. She received her PhD in 2018 from the University of Maryland, College Park and was Northwestern’s 2018-2020 Black Performing Arts Post-Doctoral Fellow.