Dr. Sasha Sanders

Dr. Sasha Sanders (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor in Performance Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Texas and an affiliated faculty member of the Women's and Gender Studies Program and LGBTQ Studies Program. She is a proud (San Francisco) Bay Area native and former first-generation college student. She earned her PhD in Communication from the University of South Florida. Previously, she earned her master's and bachelor's degree in Communication Studies from California State University, Long Beach.

Dr. Sanders draws on autoethnography, performance, and Black feminist aesthetics to question and reimagine identity, power, and place. She extends Black feminist aesthetics by using DIY art, such as stop-motion animation and comics, as forms of democratized knowledge production. Her embodied, reflexive approach to exploring media and culture intersects with Performance Studies, Critical Cultural Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, and Comic Studies. Dr. Sanders examines what she defines as "arresting moments" of racialized gender, moments that disorient one's sense of self and place forcing them to question belonging, betweenness, and the possibilities of becoming. Her interdisciplinary scholarship can be found in Text and Performance Quarterly, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Journal of Autoethnography, and Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies.