About Dr. Gray
Dr. Kishonna L Gray is an Associate Professor in Writing, Rhetoric, & Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is also faculty in the African American and Africana Studies Program. She is the Director of the Intersectional Tech Lab, a Mellon funded initiative. She currently serves as the Director of the Faculty Learning Community on eSports and Gaming.
Professor Gray is also a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She has served in this role since she was a Fellow in 2016.
Professor Gray previously served as a Martin Luther King Jr. Scholar and Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Comparative Media Studies and the Women & Gender Studies Program and a Faculty Visitor at the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research (Cambridge).
She is also an affiliate with the Center for Race and Digital Studies (NYU) and UPenn’s Center on Digital Culture and Society.
She is the author of Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming (LSU Press, 2020), Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live (Routledge, 2014), and is the co-editor of two volumes on culture and gaming: Feminism in Play (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018) and Woke Gaming (University of Washington Press, 2018).
Dr. Gray’s scholarship is intersectionally grounded in transdisciplinary theories and methods of feminism, digital studies, platform studies, game studies, criminology, sociology, and critical race scholarship. She interrogates the impact that technology has on culture and how minoritized users, in particular, influence the creation of technological products and the dissemination of digital artifacts. Her work is based on analyses of game play, platform design, and digital infrastructures.
She is regularly sought out for her expertise on issues of racial and gendered justice in gaming and technology by national and international press including Wired, USA Today, The New York Times, The Telegraph, BET, and others. Even Dr. Gray’s co-edited volume, Woke Gaming, was reviewed in The Guardian as one of the best new books about games.
In 2019, she was awarded the Evelyn Gilbert Unsung Hero award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences; in 2016, she was awarded the New Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology, and the 2023 Black in Gaming Educator of the Year Award (among others).
She is a member of several academic journal and advisory boards and holds a Ph.D. in Justice Studies from the Arizona State University (2011), and a MS (2006) and BS (2004) in Criminal Justice from Eastern Kentucky University.