Umniya Najaer

Umniya Najaer is an artist, scholar, and visionary and a doctoral candidate in the Program in Modern Thought and Literature with a PhD minor in Theatre and Performing Arts.  Umniya’s dissertation Worldbuilding at the End of the World explores what possibilities for worldbuilding—outside of the dominant episteme of western modernity—exist for us in the present and the near future. It is comprised of a set of four interlinked essays that explore how we, the people of the global majority seeking an alternative way, are actively engaged in worldbuilding practices within and outside the confines of the western episteme. In addition to the DARE fellowship, Umniya is currently a Susan Ford Dorsey Innovation fellow with the Center for African Studies and a Cave Canem Foundation for Black Poetics Fellow.