Thulani Davis

Thulani Davis is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar who is an associate professor and a Nellie Y. McKay Fellow in the African American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has had a long career in journalism while creating work in poetry and theater that includes plays and libretti for four operas. She has written the scripts for several award-winning documentaries, including Louis Massiah’s W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices (1996) and Massiah’s short film In Ragtime: James Reese Europe (2011), and she developed the concept for Blackside’s series I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African American Arts (1999). She also wrote the script for the narrative film Paid in Full (2002). She is the author of six books, the most recent of which is The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom (2022).