José Esteban Muñoz

José Esteban Muñoz (born 1967) is an American theorist in the fields of Performance Studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory. His book "Dissidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics" (1999) is a foundational text in queer of color critique, and a major contribution to minority scholarship in the field of Performance Studies. He has also co-edited "Pop Out: Queer Warhol" (1996) with Jennifer Doyle and Jonathan Flatley and "Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America" (1997) with Celeste Fraser Delgado. Muñoz is currently the chair of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

Muñoz was born in Havana, Cuba in 1967 shortly before relocating with his parents to the Cuban exile enclave of Hialeah, Florida this same year. He received his undergraduate education at Sarah Lawrence College and his doctorate from the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University, where he studied under the tutelage of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. He has written about important artists, performers, and cultural figures including Vaginal Davis, Nao Bustamante, Carmelita Tropicana, Isaac Julien, Kevin Aviance, James Schuyler, and Andy Warhol. He is currently completing two manuscripts: the first, "Feeling Brown: Ethnicity, Affect, and Performance", is forthcoming from Duke University Press, and the second, "Cruising Utopia: the Performance and Politics of Queer Futurity", will be published by NYU Press.

A revelatory interview of José Esteban Muñoz can be accessed [http://hemi.nyu.edu/archive/ram/jose.ram here] .