æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil (she/they) is a Chicago-based concurrent Ph.D. Candidate in Black Studies, MFA student in Documentary Media, and Mellon Cluster Fellow in the Critical Theory program at Northwestern University. hollis o’neil also holds a Master of Arts in American Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Documentary Filmmaking from The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Their interdisciplinary research spans the fields of Black queer and trans studies, Black feminist theory, political ontology, visual culture, performance studies, and film theory and practice.
Identity formation and its discontents are essentially at the core and crux of their academic research and artistic practice respectively. She is currently working on her dissertation, Translating the Void: Anti-Blackness, Racial Adaptation, and Trans Narrativity– from Stage to Screen & In-Between which examines the onto-epistemological dimensions of Black gender identity through narratives of racialized gender transition and adaptation. Their MFA experimental documentary thesis film, in the interval, considers related themes of racialized gender, sexuality, desire, kinship, enfleshment and embodied capital, personhood, violence and belonging.
