Jake Nussbaum
Lecturer
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Bio
Jake Nussbaum (he/him) is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and scholar. He works at the intersections of creative practice and the social sciences. He holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, and a graduate certificate from the Center for Experimental Ethnography. In 2024–2025, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia. As a musician, he is deeply invested in improvisation and collaboration. He has studied in classical, jazz, experimental, Arabic, West African, and Afro-Caribbean traditions.
Jake's scholarly research engages a question central to the fields of cultural anthropology and performance: How do creative practices such as music and dance transform political life and contribute to a more just social world? His current book manuscript, Beyond Time: Experiments in Performance and Abolition, Philadelphia, is a multimodal ethnography of abolitionist social movements in Philadelphia building durable alternatives to police, prisons, and private property. From the city’s first Black mutual aid societies in the late 18th century to contemporary struggles for the decriminalization of homelessness, he studies how abolitionist social movements and Black performance traditions are co-constituted through embodied practices such as group improvisation, trauma-aware choreography, and transforming participants’ experiences of time.
Personal Statement
As an artist, the creative methods I use emerge from the questions I ask with my collaborators and my community. In the past I have made art books, pirate radio stations, costumes, card systems, zines, sound installations, drawings, archival exhibitions, and essay films. I am always experimenting in new modalities and asking more questions.
As an ethnographer, I use multimodal and experimental arts to build reparative and collaborative knowledge with my community. In addition to academic publication, I create experimental films, zines, participatory installations, audio documentaries, and other creative forms that advocate for justice and enact what Steven Feld calls a “politics of amplification” across differences in identity and privilege.