Aliyah Efotte

Aliyah Efotte is a doctoral student in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. Her research examines art and material culture from the twentieth century to the present, with particular attention to the ways artworks register and mediate historical, sociopolitical, and ecological conditions. Her writing on artists including Woody De Othello, Peter Lanyon, and Jack Whitten considers the art object as a site where material, perceptual, and historical forces converge. Her broader intellectual interests include philosophical debates surrounding abstract visual perception and the role of abstraction as an affective technology. Aliyah is also a fellow at Yale’s Center for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.

Her public-facing writing has appeared in the New Haven Advocate, alongside research and curatorial collaborations with the Yale School of Art and the Yale Center for British Art. When not reading or exclaiming, Aliyah can be found scaling rock faces or cycling up, down, and around New England hills.