Dr. Maria I. Velazquez received her doctorate from the University of Maryland, College-Park. Her dissertation, "Reclaiming Black Beledi,"focuses on belly dance and its use as embodied political rhetoric post-9/11, and is under review at the University of Illinois Press as part of the National Women's Studies Association First Book Prize competition. Her recent publications include "Reblog If You Feel Me: Love, Blackness, and Digital Wellness" in Yoga, the Body, and Embodied Social Change, “The Occasional Ethnicities of Lavender Brown: Race as a Boundary Object in Harry Potter” in Critical Insights: Contemporary Speculative Fiction, and “’Come Fly With Us!’: Playing with Girlhood in the World of Pixie Hollow” in Cases on Digital Game-Based Learning. She received her MA in Gender/Cultural Studies from Simmons College. She recently concluded her postdoc with the Transnational Black Citizenship Project with the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. She is now currently teaching at a high school in the New Orleans area.

Many of Maria's publications are available on her Academia.edu page.