Naima Adams

Born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, Naima Adams (she/they) is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies and Ethnicity. Her writing and public programming operate at the nexus of black feminist and queer theory, media studies, and science and technology studies. 

Her manuscript, Black Obsolescence: The Affective Ruse and Plastic World of Technostalgia, charts how Black aesthetics and ecologies constitute the rise and revival of analog media technologies. This project foregrounds the material composition and life cycle of Black feminist and queer media artefacts from the 1970s to 1990s. In popular culture the emergence and revival of analog technologies is associated with innovation and technostalgia, or the longing for obsolete technology. She argues that these associations obscure how analog sound, video, and print technologies inaugurated new modes for: one, rendering the Black body endlessly reproducible and available in audiovisual formats; and, two, expropriating and polluting Black-Native land. 

Adams’ work has earned national fellowships through the Ford Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Point Foundation, Elton John AIDS Foundation, Imagining America, and HASTAC. Her publications appear in GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, American Quarterly, the Oxford African American Studies Center, and Spit and Spider Press.

She has programmed events with and for the Academy Museum of Motion Picture, California African American Museum, California Arts Council, City of West Hollywood, Getty Pacific Standard Time, Oxy Arts, Visual AIDS, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. She has consulted for the Guggenheim Museums, Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, House of AWT, and That Dance Show. She has presented her work at venues like the 198 Contemporary Art & Learning in London, Broad Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Dartmouth Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life, and the University of Manchester’s Summer Sexuality School. 

• B.A. Occidental College, 5/2017