Dr. Durell M. Callier is an artist-scholar who employs Black feminist and queer methodologies to explore the interconnectivity of race, gender, sexuality, and culture. His research documents, analyzes, and interrogates the lived experiences of Black youth and their communities. Analyzing these dynamics, Callier’s scholarship illuminates how Black art and creative practices subvert, respond to and reimagine Black life amidst anti-Black and anti-queer violence.
His deep investment in the arts as a way of knowing informs his scholarship, pedagogy, and service to his community. Through his production of performance and arts-based scholarship he explores what else is imaginatively possible for Black, and queer youth, and how these communities leverage creativity to understand, and envision their own lives. As an extension of this work, Callier along with Dr. Dominique C. Hill co-created an arts-based research collaborative known as Hill L. Waters (HLW). A laboratory for Black queer world making since 2012, HLW’s creative practice and scholarship enacts embodied pedagogy to investigate the interplay of race, gender, and sexuality, within Black communities and as a practice for fashioning Black liberation. Together they have written and performed shows including when the stakes are too high (2018), Bodies on Display (2016), and Love, Funk, & Other Thangs (2013). Callier’s performance and visual work also includes Look now, look again (2023), Staging Blackqueer Possibilities (2018), Tell It! (2016), OUT (2013).
Callier has co-authored two books, Who look at me?!: Shifting the Gaze of Education Through Blackness, Queerness, and the Body with Dominique C. Hill (Brill, 2019), and Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet: Qualitative Inquiries on Race, Gender, Sexualities, and Culture with Bryant Keith Alexander, Mary Weems & Dominique C. Hill (Routledge, 2022), as well as written numerous articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia references. His scholarship has been featured in journals such as American Quarterly, Curriculum Inquiry, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Text & Performance Quarterly, and Theatre Topics with his visual art exhibited at the Krannert Art Museum in Champaign, Illinois, and The Venue in Dayton, Ohio. He is currently working on two projects, including a book on the queering of Black youth through educultural practices and a series of collages and embodied performances which celebrate and remember Black queer life.
