Tao Leigh Goffe

Tao Leigh Goffe is a London-born, Black British award-winning writer, interdisciplinary artist, and professor who grew up between the UK and New York City. She is writing two books. The first DARK LABORATORY will be published by Penguin Random House in 2025; it explores the origin story of the climate crisis by looking to Christopher Columbus in the Eden of the Caribbean where he arrived in 1492. The second book BLACK CAPITAL, CHINESE DEBT is forthcoming with Duke University Press, and was interpreted as a short film by Hulu in 2021. It tells the futurist story of Afro-Asian techno-feminism based on Tao’s life as part of the series Initiative 29 on Black histories, heroes, and futures. Titled ASK A CHINESE QUESTION, GET A BLACK ANSWER,  (dir. Carmen LoBue) the film is a time travel experience through Black and Asian worlds.

Committed to building intellectual communities, Tao is the founder and Executive Director of the Dark Laboratory, an engine for the study of race, technology, and climate through digital and analog storytelling. Members of the lab use media and data to examine stolen land and stolen life across the Americas, addressing the entangled histories of the dispossession of Native sovereignty and the enslavement of Africans.

Tao lives and works in Manhattan where she is an artist-in-residence at Columbia University and a member of the New Museum’s incubator for art and technology NEW INC. She is an Associate Professor of literary theory and cultural history at Hunter College, CUNY. Tao studied English literature at Princeton University as an undergraduate before pursuing a PhD at Yale University. A sought-after speaker, Tao delivers keynotes on topics including geology, Black Studies, sound technologies, and her creative practice.