Uri McMillan is Professor of English and Gender Studies at UCLA, with an emphasis on 20th- and 21st-century artistic production by artists of color. He has written two books, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (NYU, 2015) and Mavericks of Style: The Seventies in Color (Duke, 2025). He has also edited a special issue of Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory, entitled “Surface Aesthetics: Race, Performance, Play,” and has published numerous essays on visual and performance artists, including Simone Leigh, Christina Quarles, Derek Fordjour, Renee Cox, Senga Nengudi, and Maren Hassinger.

He serves as co-editor and co-founder of the book series imprint, Minoritarian Aesthetics, (NYU Press), and has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for the Advanced Study, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.