At the intersections of Black Feminist Theory, Black Geographies, and Climate Justice
Scholar, writer, and conceptual artist weaving stories of land, love, grief, and Black futurity.
Check out some of my latest work.
- Byrd, Breanna, and Lang, Christopher, “All That’s Left Behind: Black Ecological Interventions on Waste and Plastic,” On_Culture, 17, October, 2024.
- SISTORIES: An Interactive Black Feminist Literary Magazine, Issue V, Fluid By Nature: Texture, Memory, & Ecology of the Black South, August 2025
Selections: “Reach Back,” pg. 32, “Planet Blue,” pg. 66
Meet Breanna Byrd
Breanna Byrd, Ph.D. (she/they), received their PhD in Feminist Studies with a designated emphasis in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research charts the ecosocial relationships among Black communities in the United States and the Global South. Their work also engages questions around the “Anthropocene,” apocalypse, and sustainable futures. Looking to where narratives of world-ending/world-making take place, she thinks with Black geographies to center Black communities and their strategic practices of care. Their creative and scholarly work weaves together histories of land, belonging and futurity to tell a story beyond the inevitability of climate collapse. Dr. Byrd is the Andrew Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate Humanities and Social Justice at the Climate Museum, a 2025 Taproots Artist in Residence with the North Carolina Climate Justice Collective, and a former Luminary Editorial Fellow with SISTORIES: An Interactive Black Feminist Literary Magazine.
As an artist, their work navigates grief, memory, and the natural world to not just tell stories of survival but also of consistent connection. If trauma is the rupturing of relationships (to the self, the family, community, place, etc.) Byrd sees their work as slowly weaving thick ropes to pull these things in close for themselves and others. Working to imagine, write towards, and organize for what’s possible beyond collapse and apocalypse, she firmly believes that we have already survived the end of many worlds and that something else is always possible, even if it’s hard to get to.
