Tao Leigh Goffe is a writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York. For the past 15 years, she has worked as an academic and has been invited to give keynote lectures in her specialties of colonial histories of race, geology, climate, and media technologies. Her research and curatorial work is rooted in literatures and theories of labor that center Black feminist engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations. Much of her artistic and sound design practice examines the geological bedrock of colonialism. She has previously worked at Yale University, Cornell University, Leiden University, New York University, and Princeton University.

Currently, she is an associate professor at Hunter College, CUNY where she teaches classes on literary theory and cultural history. Goffe is writing a book on how the climate crisis is a racial crisis called Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (Doubleday and Hamish Hamilton (Penguin UK)). Her second book, Black Capital, Chinese Debt (Duke University Press), presents a long history of racialization, modern finance, and indebtedness, bringing together subjects of the Atlantic and Pacific markets from 1806 to the present under European colonialism. Goffe was also an artist-in-residence at Columbia University Climate School (2022–2024), and she is a member of NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art and technology in New York City (2022–present). She is the founder of the Dark Laboratory, an engine for the study of race, technology, and ecology through digital storytelling (virtual reality (VR) augmented reality (AR) (XR)); as well as the executive director of the Afro-Asia Group, an organization that centers the intersections of African and Asian diasporas, futurity, and radical coalition towards sovereignty. Goffe studied English literature at Princeton University before earning her PhD at Yale University.