“Frida Kahlo Boléro Meets Transnational Feminisms” – September 8th – 5:30pm, Alumni Reading Room

You are invited to “Frida Kahlo Boléro Meets Transnational Feminisms,” a lecture-performance by Oxana Chi and Dr. Layla Zami, in cooperation with Dr. Kim Bobier’s Transnational Feminisms course.

Date: September 08, 2026
Time: 5:30pm 
Location: Library, Alumni Reading Room

The session opens with a dance performance accompanied by live-music, Wings to Fly: Frida Kahlo Boléro. It evokes an artist whose biography and legacy often represents “crossroads” between aesthetics, gender identities, cultural belongings, and spiritual worlds. Oxana Chi’s choreography takes the famous Béjart Boléro as its starting point while blending ballet with Caribbean bélè dance and German movement styles. Layla Zami’s sounds on the saxophone and loops are rooted in classical and contemporary music with a touch of jazz and Caribbean grooves. Dr. Zami, a former Pratt faculty member, contextualizes the performance from a transnational feminist perspective with a talk addressing crossroads, memory and spacetime in Kahlo’s work. Extending out from this frame, the lecture-performance also explores the interrelations between bodies, homes, and historical trauma in contemporary visual art by Black diasporic women. The second half of this event engages students and other audience members in conversation.

Dr. Layla Zami (France/Martinique) is an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, award-winning educator and the author of Contemporary PerforMemory: Dancing Through Spacetime, Historical Trauma, and Diaspora in the 21st Century (2020). A professor at the Campus Caraïbéen des Arts in Martinique, she teaches art history, performance studies and research methodology. Zami was adj. associate professor (HMS, HAD, ADE) and a Co-Chair of Black Lives Matter at Pratt. As a musician, she tours internationally with Oxana Chi Dance & Art.

Oxana Chi (Germany/Nigeria) is a dancer-choreographer, curator, filmmaker, visual artist and the author of Sichtbar Bleiben: Black Lesbian Archives Matter! Her three decades of practice on the five continents include commissioned works for The Kitchen and guest teaching at NYU. She is listed in The Dance Enthusiast’s “A to Z of People Who Power The Dance World” and an awardee of Performance Studies international.