Dr. Calvente’s primary areas of research are Black Studies, Performance Studies, and Cultural Studies. Her interests lie in the critical interrogation of anti-black and brown racism and the experiences, representations, and theories of the Black Diaspora and coloniality. Her current project centers on the function of stories as travel to highlight the complex ways in which the bodies of the storytellers are surveilled and contained as well as how Blackness and liberation are negotiated. She is co-editor of Imprints of Revolution: Visual Representations of Resistance (Roman & Littlefield International 2016) and contributor to journals and multiauthor volumes in her field.

At A Studio in the Woods, she worked collaboratively with Guadalupe García on a study of women in Havana, Cuba.