Denise Ferreira da Silva

artist and critical theorist

Denise Ferreira de Silva is artist and philosopher and the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at the New York University, New York.

Her artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on themes and questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, Black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of, among others, Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) and Unpayable Debt (2022). Her artwork includes the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), and Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020) in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational artistic practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri.