Shana L. Redmond, Ph.D. (she/her) is a native of Racine, Wisconsin and the child of working-class parents, whose experiences of service work and incarceration were formative in the creation of her political and racial identities. It is from these knowledges that she approaches her scholarship and other efforts at world-making, which are concerned with exposing and challenging the material conditions that encode and enforce difference and radical vulnerability while holding up those spectacular and mundane methods by which African-descended people train for beauty in spite of and alongside those conditions.

A writer and scholar, Redmond has published widely, including two acclaimed books, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (NYU Press, 2014) and the award-winning Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke UP, 2020); more than a dozen articles and book chapters in, for example, Futures of Black Radicalism, Current Musicology, Women & Music, Race & Class, Thinking from Black, Black Camera, and American Quarterly; and media features and album liner notes for National Public Radio, British Broadcasting Corporation, Mother Jones, Boston Review, Verve, and Sony. She has consulted and provided expert interviews for music and theatre organizations, podcasts and films, grassroots organizations and political committees as well as radio and print media.

She is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race at Columbia University where she organizes The Radio in the Orchard (TRiO), a radical rehearsal in scholarly and creative futures. The recipient of numerous prizes and awards, she is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow in Music Research and currently writing a speculative nonfiction book about the musicality of Black life before state violence. She lives in New York City with her family.