Isis Barra Costa is a Brazilian-born scholar, instructor, poet, and elder in the Orisha tradition of Cuba. She earned her BA in English Literature with an Education major from Pontifícia Universidade Católica of São Paulo, Brazil, before receiving a scholarship for graduate studies at New York University. In her twenties, she moved to the U.S., where she obtained an MA in English Literature and a PhD in Comparative Literature. Under the mentorship of Caribbean and African professors, she developed into a transdisciplinary scholar with a focus on African Brazilian literature and philosophy. Since 2017, she has served as a professor in Contemporary Brazilian Cultural and Literary Studies at Ohio State University, having previously taught at Arizona State, Rutgers, and New York universities. She has co-authored anthologies in Argentina (on comparative studies of Brazilian and Argentinean cultures), Portugal (on media ecology, image studies, and digital knowledge-making), and the U.S. (on the African diaspora). Her forthcoming book, Imagining the Past Remembering the Future: Philosophies, Cosmologies, and Religious Traditions of the Afro-Brazilian Diaspora, is under contract with Columbia University Press.