Alexis Ligon Holloway is a Cultural Anthropology PhD candidate and Dean’s Graduate Fellow at Duke University. She earned her undergraduate degree from Amherst College, triple majoring in anthropology, music, and an interdisciplinary major focusing on ethnographic film. Alexis then went on to attend New York University (NYU) to complete her Masters in Cinema Studies and earn the Culture and Media Certificate. She produced a capstone documentary film that investigated her mother’s career as a triathlete in the midst of a 21-year battle with cancer. Her film, Living with Grace, was featured in the 2019 Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York City. Alexis’ current research explores how the mechanisms of white supremacy operate in classical music performance, examining how racial and aesthetic hierarchies position black bodies as aberrant in these spaces. As a filmmaker, Alexis hopes to produce a multi-modal dissertation, consisting of a written portion and an accompanying documentary that attends to the aural and performative aspects of her research. Alexis is currently working on the Decolonial Pedagogy Committee at Duke, collaborating with professors to create a black feminist theories syllabus for incoming Cultural Anthropology graduate students. As one of the chairs of the Association of Black Anthropologist’s Student Interest Group (SIG), Alexis is passionate about working against gate keeping practices that discourage underrepresented students from feeling welcomed and valued.
