Zalika U. Ibaorimi, PhD (she/they), also going under the artist name N.H.I., is an antidisciplinary artist, Assistant Professor of Black Sexualities in the Department of African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University and a 2021-2023 Carter G. Woodson Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia. Her forthcoming book with Duke University Press is titled, Haunted Femmes, Haunting Spectators: Human Material and Digital Enfleshments of Shame, Pleasure, and Desire, and will be published in October 2027. In this book manuscript, they think about the relationship between ontology and the deviant Black femme (dis)figure as an excessive preoccupation with beingness—a type of paradoxical relation between the overrepresentation and underrepresentation of this Black femme ((dis)figure). Spectatorship garners designation. This is performed through looking, watching, and gazing to penetrate what we may or may not know or understand about our past, this contemporary period, and what may be to come through space and place. The mythic Black designation of the Human is constructed based on the deviant Black femme’s negation and presumed irrelevance, which produces something else for this femme to be. Furthermore, by analyzing shame through the public sphere, this study interrogates ways of knowing Black femme desire and pleasure that are rendered inaccessible through the lives of three deceased Black femmes– Billie Holiday, Kenneka Jenkins, and Islan Nettles. Ibaorimi specializes in Black Study, Visual Culture, Art & Performance, Anti-Blackness, Black Porn/Sex Work Studies, Black Feminisms, Sexual Violence/Rape Studies, Dark Black Study, Experimental Methods, Political Philosophy, and Western/Critical/Anti/Counter Humanisms. As a scholar and performance-based artist, she uses the experimental approaches of research-creation to engage Black Study. 

Emerging from their experimental film and crit-porno be(cum)ing: on humanist edging, they are working on their second book project, BE(CUM)ING: N.H.I. in Three Acts. This work explores the concern of how rape studies and porn studies work in tandem as subfields that trouble the binary impulses to either deny or affirm inquiries of the pornographic. 

Sample Publications: 

Peer Review

Ibaorimi, Zalika U. 2025. The pornographer and the party: humanism’s sensuous dismemberment of the black femme body. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2025.2521142

Ibaorimi, Zalika U. 2021. "The (Ho) rror of It All: Ganja & Hess, Summer Walker and the Soundtrack of Ho Ontologies." Journal of Popular Music Studies 33, no. 4: 34-38.

Exhibition

Ibaorimi, Zalika U. 2022.  partus/chorus (art exhibition) write-up/press release, curated by Ja'Tovia Gary with Eniola Dawodu, Doreen Lynette Garner & Ja'Tovia Gary, galerie frank elbaz, Paris

Photography

A Gathering Together Literary Journal, Fall 2020 ‘Resonance’ issue, photography 

Visual Art, Performance,and New Media

Ibaorimi, Zalika U/ n0humaninv0lved. 2024. (be)cum(ing): on humanist edging (crit-p0rno/performance)

Ibaorimi, Zalika U. 2020. "Jawn Theory." Visual and New Media Review, Fieldsights, June 18. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/jawn-theory