Dr. Jessica N. Pabón-Colón (she/her) is a diaspoRican performance studies scholar of identity, community, and resistance. Broadly, she studies what feminism does using a queer feminist lens. After a decade as the only Puerto Rican faculty member in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at SUNY New Paltz, she resigned from her tenured position in protest.
She went to her first National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) conference in 2002, but it was not until 2015 that she stepped into a leadership role as a co-founder (and co-chair) of the Arts & Performance Interest Group; her term ended in 2018, but she is still an active member of the constituency group. In 2022, she began organizing NWSA members to create a Puerto Rican Feminisms Interest Group that became an official constituency group as of 2025. In 2023 she was elected to serve on the NWSA Governing Council as a Member-at-Large, and then in 2025 she was elected to be the next President of the association. Her two-year term begins November 16, 2025.
From 2021 to 2024 she served as the Secretary on the Executive Council for the Puerto Rican Studies Association, which brought her into close community with many Rican scholars and planted the seeds for her anthology on Rican feminisms. Her favorite responsibility in this role was working with the members and the council to organize conferences and symposiums.
As an interdisciplinary scholar, her essays appear across a diverse group of peer-reviewed academic journals including: Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Theatre History Studies, Performance Research, and TDR: the journal of performance studies.
She has contributed chapters to anthologies such as The History and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop in the United States (forthcoming, fall 2025), Latina Outsiders: Remaking Latina Identity (2019), La Verdad: An International Dialogue on Hip Hop Latinidades (2016), and the Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art (2016).
She is the author of Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora (NYU Press, 2018) and editor of the anthology, Porque Estamos Aquí: Puerto Rican Feminisms Against Empire (The Feminist Press, November 2025).
Jessica works and lives on the unceded ancestral homelands of the Munsee Lenape people, in the Hudson Valley of New York. She spends her summers as a butterfly doula assisting monarchs survive their migration journeys (#ButterfliesAgainstBorders) and can otherwise be found baking sourdough everything, sewing, playing with her furbabies, and in the forest admiring the moss.
Jessica N. Pabón, PhD 