Nicole R. Fleetwood is a cultural theorist and writer interested in visual culture, black cultural history, gender and feminist studies, performance, creative nonfiction, and poverty studies. She is the author of two books: Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness, which was the recipient of the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, and On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2015). Her articles appear in African American Review, American Quarterly, Aperture, Callaloo: Art and Culture in the African Diaspora, Public Culture, Signs, Social Text, tdr: the journal of performance studies, art catalogues, and edited anthologies.