Chrystel Oloukoï
About
Chrystel Oloukoï’s research and interests are at the intersection of black studies, urban studies, political economy, abolition geographies, film studies and queer theory. Their book manuscript and experimental film series, black nocturnal: Insurgent Nightscapes in Lagos, examine the afterlives of colonial technologies of temporal discipline on urban nocturnal ecologies. The book contends with the quotidian ways urban residents, especially those marginalized by race, class, citizenship, sexuality and labor, resist criminalization and brutal policing to reclaim night spaces as sites of reprieve, life-making and otherwise futures. With the Lagos-based film collective, Monangambee, they also co-lead a digital humanities research, mapping and storytelling platform on Black movie theaters and screening spaces, entitled Dream Palaces, Black Cinema Spaces.
Awards
- CIFAR Global Scholar, Humanity's Urban Future, 2026-2028
- Fellow, Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2026
- Prize winner, International Association of Art Critics (AICA), 2025
- Fellow, Irene Yamamoto Arts Writers Fellowship, 2023
- Fellow, Carter G. Woodson Institute, 2022-2024
Relevant Publications
- Oloukoï, C. (forthcoming). “On Lagos night/life and queer inhabitation(s)” special issue “Blackness and Inhabitation,” edited by Aicha Diallo, Alana Osbourne and Asha Best, Public Culture
- Oloukoï, C. (2026). “Blinded By The Light: Beyond Enlightenment Thinking” in Cinema and the City in the Era of Planetary Urbanisation, by Nitin Bathla, Silvia Cipelletti, Markus Lähteenmäki and Klearjos E. Papanicolaou (co-eds), De Gruyter Brill.
- Bergamelli, A. A., Oloukoï, C., & Emmanuel, E. (2025). On Screening Sambizanga in Lagos: The Monangambee Film Collective in Conversation. Black Camera, 17(1), 143-154.