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. She engages Black material and digital publics as landscapes to trace the Human sexual geographies between the relation of the Black femme and spectator. Their relationality is tethered to the logics of shame, desire, and pleasure. Additionally, she considers the discursiveness of critical Humanism as a way to chart the figuration of the Black wh0re vis-à-vis the counter and anti-Human. She uses Black gender and sexuality analytics to engage Visual Culture Studies through the logics of Black Studies and Black Porn/Sex Work Studies. Ibaorimi specializes in performance, haunting, Black queerness, ontology, horror, flesh, sonics, the human and deviant modalities of Blackness/AntiBlackness. As a scholar and performance-based photographer, she uses the experimental approaches of research-creation to engage Black Study. She is currently working on two book projects, Haunted Femmes, Haunting Spectators and N.H.I. in Three Acts.

In her work, they study both the uses and incongruence of the ontological and spectatorial import and gaze of the Black publics’ relationship to the “deviant” Black femme subject. She “watches” through Black Studies, Black queer feminist psychogeographic mapping, dance and performance studies, visual culture, and Black Porn/sex work studies. They think through surveillance, alienation, identity performance and watchability/unwatchability.

Sample Publications: 

Peer Review

Ibaorimi, Zalika U. 2021. “The (Ho)rror of It All: Ganja & Hess, Summer Walker and the Soundtrack of Ho Ontologies'' (digital visual article/ textual article), Journal of Popular Music Studies 

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 and New Media

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

Book Entry

McCoy, Melanie. 2018. "Black Power Encyclopedia: From" Black is Beautiful" to Urban Uprisings." ABC-CLIO