Dr. Destiny Crockett is a scholar, artist, teacher, and poet who is originally from St. Louis, Missouri. Her art practice in Philadelphia has situated her within deep intergenerational community of Black visual artists, especially women and queer artists. Her main visual media is handcut paper collage, as it allows for a meditation on Blackness and being: collecting, compiling, reclaiming, and storytelling. Her visual art practice has been supported in part by The Colored Girls Museum, where she works through an artist incubator program, and where her original handcut collage works are part of the permanent collection. Some showings of work in the community have included the University of Pennsylvania’s Critical Museum Studies Group’s group exhibit titled Partage: an Exhibition on Scars and Sutures of the Colonial Museum, and d’griot gallery in Germantown, who held her first solo show in fall 2023. Published visual artwork has been featured in online magazines Aunt Chloe and Lesbians are Miracles.

She earned my PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania with certificates in Africana Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in 2023, and her B.A. in English from Princeton University in 2017. She currently works as the Mellon Humanities Post-doctoral Fellow of Childhood Studies and Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Camden, where she is working on her first respective academic and poetry book monographs and teaches undergraduate literary and cultural criticism courses situated in Black feminist and Girlhood Studies. Her youth-oriented work has centered on culturally relevant literacy for Black children in poor and working class communities and political education through literature and visual art for Black youth.