AB Brown (she/they) is a research-based artist, writer, and educator. She creates site-responsive, socially engaged, and participatory performances that unearth the material histories  of place, social structures , and the more than human. Brown is currently developing two large scale projects: a haunted botany, which traces the colonial histories of various plant species and how they continue to impact the present; and, The Garden of Trans Care, which animates queer and trans relationships to the natural world as a way to transform violent social structures. Their work has been supported by a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award from The Institute for Citizens & Scholars, as well as by the MAP Fund, the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Buck Lab for Climate and Environment, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, and the New England Humanities Consortium.

Brown’s scholarship builds on a decade of creating performance with LGBTQ asylum seekers in South Africa and demonstrates the role of queer and trans performance in reimagining the colonial legacies of international asylum policy and its effects on the representation of refugees and their everyday lives. Her writing can be found in The Brooklyn Rail, the edited anthologies Queer Nightlife and Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation, Women and Performance: a Journal of feminist theory, Text and Performance Quarterly, and the Journal of African Cultural Studies, among others. 

Brown received their Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University with specializations in Postcolonial Theory and Gender & Sexuality Studies.