Jaye Austin Williams

Jaye Austin Williams is a critically acclaimed director, playwright and actor. She is also a scholar who specializes in the analysis of drama, cinema and performance theories through critical Black study. Her work focuses on the structural and global implications of antiblackness, and how their myriad, violent performances – both subtle and overt – emanate from the collective unconscious within global modernity.

Her dramatic adaptations create a torsion between the gazing audience’s desire for redemption of blackness into the universal, and the confrontation with redemption’s foreclosure by the collective unconscious (and increasingly, consciously articulated interests) and its violent bearing upon black existence, regardless of economic class, cultural identity, etc.). Dr. Williams is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Dept. of Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University. She will join the faculty in the new Dept. of Black Study at the University of California, Riverside in Fall 2025.