Mellon Arts Dialogue was one of the initiatives under the Mellon Arts Program focused on in-depth conversation between Columbia faculty and distinguished Black artists working in various disciplines.
Dialogues were meant to offer greater insight into the creative process of the artists and provide a context for their contribution to the field.
These dialogues provided a way of understanding contributions made by black creatives today. The series was accessible to audiences at Columbia and the public at large.
Okwui Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn-based performer, choreographer and writer creating multidisciplinary performance pieces. The child of immigrants from Nigeria, Okpokwasili was born and raised in the Bronx, and her performances draw on the histories and imagined futures of places and women whose voices have long been overlooked and continue to be marginalized. She has received many awards for outstanding performance including the Bessie Award, and the MacArthur Genuis Grant Award.
Interviewer Saidiya Hartman is the author of “Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America” (1997; Norton, 2022); “Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007) and “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments” (Norton, 2019), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, the Mary Nickliss Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the Judy Grahn Prize for Lesbian Nonfiction, and the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. She is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and a University Professor. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 1984 and obtained a PhD from Yale University 1992.
Presented in co-sponsorship by
- Mellon Foundation and Columbia University Mellon Arts Project
- Department of African American & African Diaspora Studies- Columbia University (AAADS)
- Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University (IRAAS)