About

Uri McMillan is an associate professor of English, Sexuality & Gender Studies, and African American Studies at UCLA. He is a cultural historian whose research and writing focus on the intersections of black cultural studies, performance studies, queer theory, and contemporary art. His work explores themes such as black performance art, objecthood, avatars, and the cultural expressions of black women artists. McMillan's first book, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance, published by NYU in 2015, examines black performance art and related phenomena. He has published articles on performance art, digital media, hip-hop, photography, and nineteenth-century performance cultures in various academic journals. McMillan has also lectured at prominent art museums including MoMA PS1 and the Hammer Museum, and has contributed essays on black contemporary art for the Studio Museum of Harlem. His scholarly work has been supported by notable foundations such as the Ford Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• Philosophy
• Visual arts
• Aesthetics
• Epistemology
• Psychology
• Art history

Selected publications

• Failure, Gender-Making, and Region: Alternative Approaches to Literary Archives and the Question of Form

  American Literary History · 2026-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This review essay considers three essays that tackle questions of form, meaning, and genre across three distinct sets of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. Across both well-known narratives and more obscure published and unpublished works, these scholars contend with the difficulty of these texts and the demands they make for alternative methods of interpretation. Spanning slave narratives, a “lost” novel by W.E.B Du Bois, and a virtually ignored novel by Canadian writer Winnifred Eaton, these essays detail the application of expansive and contrary analytical frameworks, such as failure, region, and gender-making. In doing so, these essays suggest that when texts do not neatly align with the bodies of knowledge used to situate them within fields, the onus should be on rewriting the borders of those disciplines, rather than the texts themselves.

  PublisherDOI

• Mavericks of Style

  2025-09-12

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Mavericks of Style

  2025-09-12

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In Mavericks of Style , Uri McMillan tells the story of New York City’s downtown art and fashion scene of the 1970s through the lives and careers of experimental Black and Brown artists. McMillan focuses on model and musician Grace Jones, fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez, fashion designer Stephen Burrows, and their orbit of friends, showing how they restlessly moved across genres and disciplines, transgressing boundaries between the commercial and the avant-garde. Bypassing the exclusive art world and cultivating uniquely personal styles, these artists thrived on friendship and collaboration in their experimental use of bold color, gold lamé, and Instamatic photography. McMillan transports readers to the spaces Jones, Lopez, and Burrows frequented and worked in, from hair salons, nondescript artist studios, and buzzy boutiques to funky discos and high fashion runways. By foregrounding their impact on the decade’s aesthetics, McMillan complicates and expands the understanding of these artists, offering a new vision of New York’s art world in sultry, bombastic color.

  PublisherDOI

• Mavericks of Style

  2025-08-28

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In Mavericks of Style, Uri McMillan tells the story of New York City’s downtown art and fashion scene of the 1970s through the lives and careers of experimental Black and Brown artists. McMillan focuses on model and musician Grace Jones, fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez, fashion designer Stephen Burrows, and their orbit of friends, showing how they restlessly moved across genres and disciplines, transgressing boundaries between the commercial and the avant-garde. Bypassing the exclusive art world and cultivating uniquely personal styles, these artists thrived on friendship and collaboration in their experimental use of bold color, gold lamé, and Instamatic photography. McMillan transports readers to the spaces Jones, Lopez, and Burrows frequented and worked in, from hair salons, nondescript artist studios, and buzzy boutiques to funky discos and high fashion runways. By foregrounding their impact on the decade’s aesthetics, McMillan complicates and expands the understanding of these artists, offering a new vision of New York’s art world in sultry, bombastic color.

  PublisherDOI

• Fugitive Utterances in Modernity’s Song

  Art Journal · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Visual arts
  • Aesthetics
  PublisherDOI

• Deconstructing Little Richard

  Journal of Popular Music Studies · 2020

  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Unruly Polyvocality

  2019-11-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Black performance art, from the outset, is a vexed form; it is inextricably linked to histories of subjugation, imperialism, and personal sovereignty. Valerie Cassel Oliver concurs, arguing that black performance in the Americas may have emerged as a by-product of chattel slavery, a “dysfunctional inheritance born from mastering both personal and communal survival”. A still more panoramic view of black performance art, and its attendant aesthetic lineages, pans out even further from the prototypical confines of the museum/gallery, moving from the mundanity of the urban landscape into the ecstatic energies of nightlife. For instance, performance art produced by black American artists was excluded from museums, often at the expense of the performing arts, which artist Clifford Owens argues is due to the perception the latter more easily reads as black cultural expression. “The dramaturgy of power that haunts racial politics and contemporary expressive cultural codes was first ‘formatted’ in those grim locations”.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: skin, surface, sensorium

  Women & Performance a journal of feminist theory · 2018-01-02 · 72 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This introduction contextualizes this special issue of Women & Performance by examining surface as an object of inquiry across a variety of fields, including psychoanalysis, literary studies, sensation and affect studies, and art history. The editor of this special issue links earlier discussions of the relation between surface and depth to more recent interdisciplinary work in black diaspora studies highlighting the convergence of race, surface, and aesthetics. Through an engagement with the interplay between surface, skin, and the senses; black contemporary art in the United States; and the video work of performer Grace Jones, the editor suggests the sensuous and slippery performance work that surface play enables.

  PublisherDOI

• Alternative Structures: Aesthetics, Imagination, and Radical Reciprocity: an Interview with Girl

  ASAP/journal · 2017-01-01 · 9 citations

  articleSenior author

  Alternative Structures:Aesthetics, Imagination, and Radical Reciprocity: an Interview with Girl Simone Leigh (bio), Chitra Ganesh (bio), and Uri McMillan (bio) In the spring of 2012, on a visit to New York City, I took the train up to the Upper West Side on an explicit mission to visit the Jack Tilton Gallery. In a striking turn of fate, the gallery was running not one Click for larger view View full resolution Simone Leigh. Photograph by Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Click for larger view View full resolution Chitra Ganesh. Photograph by C. Ganesh [End Page 241] "but two of my friends' solo exhibitions simultaneously: CHITRA GANESH's The Ghost Effect in Real Time and SIMONE LEIGH's jam packed and jelly tight. Traversing elegant narrow mansions with pristine balustrades and faded facades in the upper 70s, I eventually entered a large space where I was immediately greeted by one of Leigh's arresting sculptures: a sinuous and slender wood tree trunk reaching toward the ceiling, where it cradled one of Leigh's large ceramic glazed cowrie shells covered in a brilliant appliqué of gold leaf. Upstairs, as I traversed Leigh's sculptures—chandeliers of pendulous glass containers filled with salt; a row of six figurines with headdresses made out of voluptuous configurations of cobalt blue ceramic roses—I encountered Ganesh's large-scale black-and-white charcoal drawings of scenes inspired by early cinema productions in India, Germany, and the United States. Ganesh's drawings contained imagery culled from science fiction, histories of Orientalism, and epic myth. Combining compressed charcoal with charcoal dust, the drawings were mysterious and strangely evocative, as if the remnant of charcoal dust enabled the residue of embedded historical narratives to migrate off the surface of the images and saturate the room with the density of the past. In short, the title of Ganesh's exhibition—THE GHOST EFFECT IN REAL TIME—felt especially appropriate, as the reverberating presence of hauntings seemed to pervade the room. Despite the formal divergence of Leigh and Ganesh's work, I now recognize in hindsight that the convergence of their exhibitions was really a meaningful coincidence; it was indicative of their friendship and broader commitment to each other's work—a shared affinity that is deeply implicated in each of their art practices. For Leigh and Ganesh, art and friendship are delicately intertwined and mutually transformative. [End Page 242] Both Brooklyn-based artists, ceramist Simone Leigh and painter Chitra Ganesh have been friends for several decades, and their artistic practices are informed by their upbringings as children of immigrants from Jamaica and India, respectively. Ganesh, a graduate of Brown and Columbia Universities, combines drawing, installation, text-based work, digital collage and collaboration in her praxis. She makes rich use of materials that range from lace to spray paint and from glass to chalk, and her work excavates narrative palimpsests—particularly the submerged voices and concerns of South Asian women—that often remain obscure within both conventional history and the contemporary arts. Drawing on surrealism, futurism, mythology, comic-book aesthetics, and cultures of protest, Ganesh's often large-scale yet intricate work integrates "traditional and established painting practices with the artist's unique visual iconographies and assemblages" to create artistic subjects who "confront the viewer with their gazes, acting as radiant agents of their own present and future, emerging as powerful allegories of politics, performance and fantasy."1 A current Hodder Fellow at Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts, a 2012 Guggenheim Foundation grantee, and a Kirloskar scholar-in-residence at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014, Ganesh has participated in numerous group and solo shows in New York City and elsewhere in the United States, including Word of God(ess) at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (2011), Eyes of Time at the Brooklyn Museum (2014), and The Ghost Effect in Real Time at the Jack Tilton Gallery (2012). She has exhibited around the world, with solo shows in Paris, Zurich, New Delhi, and Mumbai. In addition, her social practice has included several billboard-sized public art exhibitions in Shanghai, Lisbon, Porto, and at the Socrates Sculpture Park in New York. At the latter site, Ganesh reproduced...

  PublisherDOI

• Feminist Aesthetics and Art

  Digital Commons - RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) · 2016-03-12

  articleSenior author

  Contemporary challenges to feminist aesthetics, discourse and the practice of feminist art.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Jack Halberstam

  Columbia University

  1 shared

• Chitra Ganesh

  1 shared

• Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

  University of Southern California

  1 shared

• Eileen A. Joy

  1 shared

• Maureen Conner

  1 shared

• Jami Weinstein

  1 shared

• Susan Stryker

  1 shared

• José Esteban Muñoz

  Temple University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly…
• Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre His…
• Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African Amer…