Yasmeen Chism
Assistant Professor, Ph.D. Performance Studies
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Areas of Interest
- 19th & 20th c. Black studies
- Performance Studies
- Visual analysis
- Critical Geographies
- Black Feminism
Contact Information
- Office: Bldg. 38, Rm. TBD
- Phone: 805-756-TBD
- Email: ychism@calpoly.edu
About Yasmeen Chism
Dr. Yasmeen Chism is a scholar of black studies, performance studies, and critical geographies whose work traces the relationships between movement, place, and black social life. She earned her PhD in Performance Studies from New York University, where she used an interdisciplinary approach that braids archival research, embodied analysis, and black feminist theory.
Her manuscript‑in‑progress, Mapping Black Movement, traces the dialectical relationship between black movement and constraint as it unfolded across North Carolina’s Piedmont in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, offering a framework for understanding movement and displacement across the broader black diaspora.
As a guerrilla intellectual*, Dr. Chism meets students where they are and frames course materials as a toolkit for reading, questioning, and transforming the world around them. She guides students in understanding both the communities that formed them and the ones they inhabit now, along with the responsibilities each demands. Her pedagogy blends historical inquiry, visual and performance analysis, and community engagement to cultivate students who think critically, act with intention, and imagine otherwise.
Her work is animated by a belief that scholarship should move: across disciplines, across publics, and toward liberation.
Outside the classroom, Dr. Chism finds joy in appreciating visual art (particularly painting and photography), jazz, traveling, and the serendipity of exchanging conversation and jokes with strangers.
*in the parlance of Walter Rodney