Soyica Colbert is the Chair of the Department of Performing Arts, Director of Theater and Performance Studies (TPST) and an Associate Professor of African American Studies and TPST at Georgetown University. She is the author of The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance and the Stage (2011) and Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics (2017). Colbert edited the Black Performance special issue of African American Review (2012) and co-edited The Psychic Hold of Slavery (2016). She is currently working on an intellectual biography of playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Lorraine Hansberry: Artist/Activist. Colbert has published articles and reviews in African American Review, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, Theater Journal, Boundary 2, South Atlantic Quarterly, Scholar and Feminist Online, and Theater Topics and in the collections: Black Performance Theory, Contemporary African American Women Playwrights, and August Wilson: Completing the Cycle. She is the recipient of the Schomburg Scholars-in-Residence Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship, Mellon Summer Research Grant, and the Robert W. Woodruff Library Fellowship. Her research interests span the 19th-21st centuries, from Harriet Tubman to Beyoncé, and from poetics to performance.