Dr. Kristen Wright is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies in the Drama Department at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She holds a PhD and MA in African Studies from Cornell University, an MA in African American Studies from Columbia University, and a BA in Theatre Studies and Political Science from Yale University. Her research explores the intersections of African American theatre (from the 19th century to the present), Black performance studies, and critical theory.

She has published articles and reviews in Theatre Topics, Black Perspectives, The Gale Researcher's American Literature, Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History, and Texas Theatre Journal. Another work by Dr. Wright is forthcoming in The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Since 2017, she has served as a general member of the Performance Studies Focus Group within the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and as a representative of the Graduate Education New Paradigms Committee for the Graduate Core Group of the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR).

Dr. Wright was a Faculty Diversity Alliance Fellow in the English Department at Mount Holyoke College and previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Scholars Program at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities. She received the 2018 Knight Institute Information Literacy Award from Cornell University for her teaching excellence and the 2016 Marvin Carlson Best Student Essay Award in Theatre and Performance from Cornell's Department of Performance and Media Arts for her paper ‘I Claim to Have Killed My Mother’: Adrienne Kennedy’s Electra and Orestes, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and the Question of Justice. As a playwright and dramaturg, her works Apple Core, Miss Annie, Shirt (Civilization), Jamaal from the Empire, White Girl’s Jodeci, Pop Cycle, and Lights That Light the World were featured in Cornell’s Ten-Minute Play Festival and Spring Write! Literary Festival. Her full-length play Goose Lake Pursuit was recently produced by Cherry Arts Theatre (Ithaca, New York), developed as part of the Studio Theatre’s 2022 Spring Intensive (New York, New York), and her one-act plays...