Chrystel Oloukoï is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington. They hold a PhD in African and African American Studies from Harvard University, with concentrations in Social Anthropology, Critical Media Practice and Women Gender and Sexuality. They were a 2022-2024 predoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. 

Their research and interests are at the intersection of black studies, political economy, abolition geographies, film studies and queer theory. Their book manuscript and experimental film series, black nocturnal, insurgent nightscapes in Lagos, examine the afterlives of colonial technologies of temporal discipline on urban nocturnal ecologies. The book contends with the quotidian ways urban residents, especially those marginalized by race, class, citizenship, queerness and sex work, resist criminalization and brutal policing to reclaim night spaces as sites of reprieve, life-making and otherwise futures. Their work has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation, Mellon, ACLS, the University of Washington Global Innovation Fund, Royalty Research Fund and Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities and the Harvard University Film Study Center, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and African Studies Center, among others.

With the Lagos-based film collective, Monangambee, they lead a digital humanities research, mapping and storytelling platform — Dream Palaces, Black Cinema Spaces — supported by the ACLS Digital Justice Initiative and the UW Global Innovation Fund. With Monangambee and the artist collective hFACTOR, they have co-founded the Lagos Queer Film Festival in 2021, with subsequent annual editions. They’ve also curated an extensive number of screenings, public programs and installations with organisations such as Monangambee, Culture Arts Society, Canyon Cinema, Guest Artists Space Foundation, CalArts, Treehouse… Their writing on Black continental & diasporic cinema, experimental cinema and queer cinema has appeared in Sight & Sound, Air Afrique, World Records, Film Comment, The Criterion Channel, Metrograph, among other venues. 

For any inquiries, please reach them by email.