Dr. Daniel Ìgbín’bí Coleman, PhD (he & they, interchangeably)
Organic Intellectual. Black Transfeminist. Critical Pedagogue. Healing Arts Justice Practitioner. Olosha.
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
I am an Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University (since fall 2022) and Affiliate Faculty Member of Africana Studies, also at GSU. Prior to joining GSU, I was a Lecturer (2017-2018) and then Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (Fall 2018- Spring 2022).
I am also a Steering Committee Member of Acorn Center for Restoration and Freedom, a Black-led Afro-diasporic healing arts justice, land justice, liberation, and Black-on-Black resourcing organization.
I refer to myself as an "organic intellectual," though institutionally affiliated in a more traditional academic way (tenure-track), because my scholarly work is based on a lifelong commitment to the praxis of critical thought and pedagogy as central to a life of liberation. My thinking praxis is a response to living and being in the present world order, knowing that things could be much more just and liberatory than they presently are, especially for peoples of the Global Majority.
Because of heritage, affiliations, and blood and spiritual lineages, I am most invested in how Black and Brown (largely Indigenous) people from the Americas honor the fullness of who we/they are in spite of the ongoing legacies and the attendant violences of colonization, white supremacy, The Anthropocene, and late neoliberal capitalism.
As part of my larger commitments to genealogies of thinking-living-being praxis, I understand our planet as a pluriverse of worlds where evangelizing, homogenizing, and monopolizing practices and perspectives and practices violate the complexity of our species. Thusly, I am always in the practice of decolonizing ways of knowing, being, existing, and relating to other people and to the other beings we share our planet with.
In my first book, Refusals and Reinventions: Engendering New Black and Indigenous Life Across the Americas (2024, OSU Press) I consider my critical trajectories and participation in intersectional justice struggles in the US and Mexico, situating them within larger abolitionist and decolonial movements for Black civil rights and Native/Indigenous sovereignty. I identifies how Black and Indigenous people create, exist in, and reclaim many worlds—the pluriverse—through their artistic refusals and reinventions. My work thus contributes to a growing body of pluriversal thought, inspired by the Zapatista motto “a world in which many worlds fit.” Charting previously unrecognized connections among the creative struggles of Indigenous people in southern Mexico and Black people in the southern United States, I draw on performance praxis, decolonial pedagogies, and Afro-diasporic and Native/Indigenous cosmologies to frame four case studies of people refusing racialized, gendered violences as world-making tools. In looking at creative responses among activists in Chiapas and North Carolina, I use transfeminist, Black feminist, and decolonial frameworks to ask: How do creative insurgent practices give us access to our humanity? And what do praxis and engaged witnessing have to teach us about what worlds from the pluriverse hold?
My second book project (currently in-process) takes a deep dive into Afro-futurist and Black metaphysical and spiritual knowledge about the nature of human existence.
Scholarly Praxis
I have a PhD in Performance Studies from the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2017).
I received my MA in Theatre Arts from San José State University in 2011, a Bilingual (Spanish), Crosscultural, Language and Academic Development (BCLAD) K-8 credential in 2010, and a BA in Latin American Studies from California State University, East Bay in 2008.
My first book, Refusals and Reinventions: Engendering New Indigenous and Black Life Across the Americas (March 2024), was published by the Ohio State University Press.
The book uses four “case studies,” one per chapter, of specific artistic and political projects and/or actions located in the U.S. South and the Mexican South, that, I argue, contribute to the production of pluriversal consciousness/worlds and re-write ontological and epistemic realities for Black and Native/Indigenous peoples. I use these case studies to demonstrate how the creative work of people who refuse the stranglehold of totalizing forces does the spiritual-political labor of creating forms of being, existing, and knowing that are otherwise written out of the dominant paradigm of humanity. More on this and my other areas of interest/inquiry under Scholarship.
Artist Praxis
I am a performance artist, installation artist, dancer and choreographer.
I had a childhood pre-professional career in dance where I trained and performed for fourteen years in classical ballet (primarily Cecchetti with some Vagonava), modern dance (primarily Graham and Limón with some Horton), and contemporary ballet and modern fusions. At the end of my childhood training, I also trained and performed in semi-professional performance salsa.
Prior to my childhood professional dance career, I went on to politicize my artistic practice, developing and training in dance-theatre for social justice and then radical performance art. The combination of these artistic experiences (dance of various genres, dance-theatre, and then performance art as justice approaches/responses) has led to my practice today.
In my performance practice over the last decade, I articulate my body as a physical medium for story sharing, transfer, and as a container for larger social bodies. Through physical movement and intentional stillness, I use embodiment practices as a form of artistic mediumship to both channel and transform energies surrounding the social-political landscapes in which I traverse. I create experiences of ritual that require rigorous engagement with the performer and with fellow witnesses, inviting audiences to leave with traces and hauntings that welcome other modes of being in the world and in relation to one another. I am deeply invested in caring for my body and those of his audiences through all of my work.
I have worked as a performance artist as a member of collectives and duet projects (including three years as a core troupe member of La Pocha Nostra). As a performer and artistic pedagogue, I have taught and performed in various institutional and autonomous spaces throughout México, the U.S. and Canada, as well as in Costa Rica, Brasil, Colombia, Spain, France, Portugal, Germany, Greece, The Netherlands, Poland, and Estonia.
My current practice is focused on Orisha dance and Afro-Cuban modern dance.
Towards Other Worlds
Historically, my work in community has been grounded in accompanying and/or being inside of processes aligned with abolition, transfeminism, Black liberation, freedom of movement, LGBTQ+ liberation, and decolonization (as ongoing and incomplete processes) situated in local-global struggles for dignified existence. Rather than frame this work through the lens of "justice," because of its relationship to laws and state recognition, I imagine this work as being in the service of bringing the plurality of our worlds into fruition. I also imagine this work to be participating in the undoing the violent legacies of liberal humanism.
Internationally, I have collaborated with feminist organizers and organizations in the context of Chiapas, México to stage public interventions to denounce feminicide and transfeminicide violence met with impunity. The work involved designing rituals for public mourning that simultaneously held the state accountable. I also helped shape and initiate the first major coalition among lesbian and trans/feminists in the state of Chiapas, México.
In the context of the U.S. South, I have worked with organizations trying to end the criminal system of money bail that keeps Black and brown people disproportionately imprisoned. This work is part of a larger strategy of the long-vision of abolition.
The lessons of organizing towards the livelihoods that we deserve and countering the cisheteropatriarchal global capitalist system are part of the heartbeat of my way of thinking and being in the world.
Presently, (2020, onward), I now understand my role as one of a healing practitioner for all those striving to make our worlds what they could/should be, journeying towards a life with dignity. I use movement healing work to accompany processes of bodily emancipation for those in my communities. It is part of how I serve my people. I now also offer spiritual readings to help guide others in their processes of healing and transformation.