Odette Casamayor-Cisneros Senior Fellow 2025–2026
- Discipline
- Cultural studies
- Fellowship duration
- February 01, 2026–June 30, 2026
- Academic or artistic job title
- Associate Professor of Caribbean and Latin American Studies
- Home institution
University of Pennsylvania, US
- Contact
- Links
- Institutional website
- Associated with
Odette Casamayor-Cisneros’s work brings cultural analysis into conversation with Black feminist thought, critical race theory, and the literary, visual, and performance arts. A Cuban scholar, writer, and art critic, she examines Afro-diasporic epistemologies and cultural practices across Latin America and the Caribbean, foregrounding lived experience, embodied memory, and creative expression as vital forms of theorization. Her transdisciplinary approach advances hemispheric understandings of Black cultural production and political imagination.
Casamayor-Cisneros is the author of Utopía, distopía e ingravidez, a study of post-Soviet Cuban literature, and Una casa en los Catskills, a short story collection that explores displacement, intimacy, and belonging. Her forthcoming experimental memoir, In Black Ink: Writings from the Flesh of a Black Cuban Woman, offers an intimate meditation on Black womanhood and diasporic identity. Her work has been widely recognized, earning awards from Radio France Internationale and the Cuban Writers and Artists Union, as well as fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, UNESCO, and Harvard University (US).
