Ford is a historian and cultural critic whose projects center on the experiences of black women, girls, and non-binary femmes. She comes to The Graduate Center from the departments of Africana studies and history at the University of Delaware and, before that, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is the co-author of Kwame Brathwaite: Black is Beautiful and the author of Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion and Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul, which won the 2016 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for Best Book on Civil Rights History from the Organization of American Historians. Along with her academic work, she writes regularly for The Atlantic, and has contributed to The New York Times, The Root, Elle.com, and Aperture. She also blogs about current issues of race, gender, and popular culture and was named one of the 100 most influential African Americans by The Root. She was awarded a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, which she pursued at Princeton University, and a she has had fellowships at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.