bio
writer | artist | professor | climate researcher
Tao Leigh Goffe is a London-born, award-winning Black British writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York. For the past fifteen years she has worked as an academic and has been invited to give keynote lectures in her specialities of colonial histories of race, geology, climate, and media technologies. She is an Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY where she teaches classes on literary theory and cultural history. At present Dr. Goffe is writing a book on how the climate crisis is a racial crisis called DARK LABORATORY (Doubleday and Hamish Hamilton (Penguin UK)). Her second book BLACK CAPITAL, CHINESE DEBT, (Duke University Press) presents a long history of racialization, modern finance, and indebtedness. It brings together subjects of the Atlantic and Pacific markets from 1806 to the present under European colonialism.
Dr. Goffe lives and works in Manhattan where she was an artist-in-residence at Columbia University (2022-2024). Her research explores Black diasporic intellectual histories, political, and ecological life. She is a member of NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art and technology in New York City (2022-present). She studied English literature at Princeton University before earning her PhD at Yale University.
Dr. Goffe’s research and curatorial work is rooted in literatures and theories of labor that center Black feminist engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations. Much of her artistic and sound design practice examines the geological bedrock of colonialism. She has previously worked at Cornell University, Leiden University, New York University, and Princeton University.
Tao has provided screenwriting consultation for screenplays, TV show development, and has been an expert legal witness on histories of Black and Asian race relations for court cases. Her life story was featured as the subject of an episode of Hulu’s Your Attention Please, Initiative 29, a television series that celebrates Black heroes and futures on the 29th of each month.
Committed to building intellectual communities beyond institutions, she is the founder of the Dark Laboratory, an engine for the study of race, technology, and ecology through digital storytelling (virtual reality (VR) augmented reality (AR) (XR)). Dr. Goffe is also the Executive Director of the Afro-Asia Group, an organization that centers the intersections of African and Asian diasporas, futurity, and radical coalition towards sovereignty.
An avid home cook, she gives lectures on food histories at museums and has led corporate cooking demos. From aubergine curry to jerk snapper to vegan Jamaican patties, her recipes have been published in various collections and cookbooks. Tao documents her cooking experimentation on ‘Gastropoetics of Tao’ her Instagram / Threads account @taoleighgoffe. She tweets @taoleighgoffe; Bluesky: taoleighgoffe.
research. theory. praxis.
Her interdisciplinary research and art practice examines the unfolding and haunted relationship between imperialism and archives. DJ’ing and the concept of the “remix” is vital to her pedagogy and research. Film production, sound design, digital cartography, and oral history are also integral to her praxis as a creative technologist.
Dr. Goffe has held academic positions and fellowships at Leiden University in the Netherlands and Princeton University in New Jersey. Her writing has been published in or is forthcoming from peer-reviewed academic and more public-oriented journals, South Atlantic Quarterly, Small Axe, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Vulture, and Boston Review. As much as an author, Prof. Goffe is also invested in her role as an editor in Global Black Histories and Theories at Public Books. She has been interviewed by and quoted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Vice Munchies.
Dr. Goffe is at also at work on books on topics including colonial debt, and a manifesto on Black feminist DJ technology. She has extensive experience as a public speaker . Tao has given recent invited lectures at Harvard University, the Netherlands National Archives, the University of Southern California, Google (NY), and Brown University. For more on her bespoke workshops see here. Dr. Goffe has experience in a variety of industries, having had short stints at the United Nations, on Wall Street, in museums, academic publishing, and tech startups. She is a fellow of the Linnaean Society. She also enjoys attending technology roundtable discussions at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City which she has been participating in since 2011.
“ A mutilated and muted history was written on the body not only in scars but also in psychic trauma.”
— Albums of Inclusion: The Photographic Poetics of Caribbean Chinese Kinship