Dr. Gregory A. King

Dr. King is an interdisciplinary artist–scholar, higher-education leader, and cultural strategist whose research interrogates the conditions that shape faculty experiences in academic institutions and examines how systems of power effect and impact belonging, retention, and intellectual flourishing. He earned his Doctor of Education in Interprofessional Leadership at Kent State University, where his dissertation, Black Male Faculty Navigating Higher Education used a qualitative, phenomenological, and deeply embodied research design to theorize the interplay between race, labor, and presence in academic life.

As Assistant Provost for Faculty Development and Founding Director of the Center for Inclusive Teaching and Innovative Learning (CITIL) at the California Institute of the Arts, he operationalized research-informed faculty development through learning communities, cross-disciplinary inquiry groups, and evidence-based pedagogical interventions that address the social, emotional, and structural dimensions of learning and teaching.

Across his academic appointments, including his tenure as Associate Professor at Kent State University, Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College, and Assistant Professor at Temple University, King has designed, facilitated, and assessed programs that promote institutional and epistemic fairness and culturally responsive pedagogy. His research on faculty retention informed his work as Co-Chair of Kent State’s Anti-Racism Task Force Faculty Recruitment and Retention Subcommittee, where he authored policy recommendations, crafted frameworks, and developed mentorship infrastructures that directly respond to the findings of his dissertation regarding emotional labor, systemic exclusion, and community formation.

King’s dissertation contributes to a growing corpus of scholarship that frames Black faculty survival as both a sociocultural and institutional phenomenon - a site where identity, embodiment, and structural marginalization converge. His research gestures toward a methodological stance reflected in his development of “dance as social text” and his commitment to understanding human experience through performance, narrative, and relational inquiry. His work positions the academic institution as a cultural landscape, one where rituals, hierarchies, and norms must be read with the same rigor applied to ethnographic sites.

Dr. King extends his scholarly commitments into community-centered cultural work. As Director of Education and Research for Support Black Theatre in Los Angeles, he led the development of the GroundED curriculum, a multiyear theatre, wellness, and workforce program for youths ages 14 – 25, drawing upon concepts of identity formation, cultural memory, and performance as communal knowledge production.