About

Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud is an arts writer, curator, historian of art and performance. She is Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Performance Studies in the School of Drama at the University of Washington, with an affiliate appointments in the departments of Art History and Comparative History of Ideas (CHID). Her work documents artists excluded from official archives, and advocates for the vital role of the arts in civic and everyday life.

An essayist, scholar, and arts journalist, Mahmoud’s writing appears in Modern Drama, Performance Research, Theater, TDR: The Drama Review, Women & Performance, as well as in Art Forum, ASAP/J Online, Canadian Art Review, Common Reader, Crosscut, Howlround, Hyperallergic, LitHub, The Seattle Times, South Seattle Emerald, and Variable West. She co-edited Makeshift Chicago Stages: A Century of Theater and Performance (Northwestern University Press 2021) with Megan Geigner and Stuart Hecht, which was supported by the 2020 ASTR Collaborative Research Award. Central methods and fields include performance ethnography, arts and cultural policy, Black feminist performance, avant-garde performance, racial capitalism, queer of color critique, and critical geography.

Committed to arts advocacy, she currently serves as a Governor Inslee appointed Washington State Arts Commissioner. In 2019, along with graduate students in her “Public Policy and Advocacy in the Arts” class, she founded the Seattle Arts Voter Guide. At UW, she runs the Minoritarian Performance Research Cluster, committed to investigating embodied and minoritized knowledge production (including Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian Diasporic, Queer of Color, Trans, Decolonial, Differently-Abled, and Carceral) often excluded from academic archives. In 2023, she co-chaired “Arts of Fugitivity,” the annual Association of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) conference in Seattle and Bothell, WA. She has curated three art exhibitions attentive to Black artists, and mentored student curation work. In 2024, her leadership and mentorship was recognized by the Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders award from the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.

Mahmoud received her PhD in Performance Studies (with certificates in African American and Diaspora Studies, and Critical Theory) from Northwestern University, MA in Arts Politics from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and BA in Government from Harvard University.