Pheolyn Allen

Professional Bio

Pheolyn Allen is dual-titled PhD student in English Literature and African-American and Diaspora Studies at Penn State. He holds a BA in Media Arts from the University of North Texas, where he served as an instructor for the UNT Media Arts Lab, educating marginalized communities and foster youth in media pedagogy and filmmaking techniques. Currently, he works with Penn State’s Center for Black Digital Research, serving as a creative producer and director for their various media and broadcasting projects, and he is a 2023 Junior Fellow with the Library of Congress’s Archive of Public Broadcasting. His research areas include Afrofuturism and utopic formations of Blackness, Black LGBTQ+ literature, and literary works of the Harlem Renaissance, the Gay Liberation Movement and AIDS epidemic, and the Black LGBTQ+ Ballroom community.