Black Diaspora: NIC Kay

Black Diaspora events are open to a Black- or Afro-Latinx-identifying audience only.

#blackpeopledancingontheinternet explores ways that Black online communities have engaged in the transcultural exchange of dance, movement, and music, claiming and maneuvering the internet as a space for visible, culturally coded play, political organization, and innovation. In this talk, NIC KAY will present two-movement works that have been articulated on the internet, in live performance, and sculpturally.

About NIC Kay

NIC Kay (b. 1989 Bronx, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and conceptual choreographer who works with movement to explore relationality and yearning. They employ choreography to excavate relationships between spaces, bodies, and objects in order to shift meaning and change perceptions of place. NIC works site- specifically, informed by the architecture and the inner workings of performative spaces—theaters, galleries, nightclubs, sidewalks, and the internet—to create moments of glitch, interruption, or pause. In the course of their practice, NIC has made durational performances, evening-length dances, experimental theater, performances for the internet, an artist book, sonic interventions, installations, and sculptures. NIC Kay was a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2020). They published their first book, Cotton Dreams, with Candor Arts in 2020.

About Black Diaspora

Conceived by curator Eva Yaa Asantewaa during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter uprising, Black Diaspora launched its first activities in September 2020 as a Zoom-based peer support program serving up-and-coming, Black-identified dance and performance artists from various cultural backgrounds and aesthetic traditions.

With the support of Gibney, Black Diaspora has offered numerous peer group discussions, workshops led by notable guest artists, and conversations between artists. We celebrate the resourcefulness, accomplishments, and generous wisdom of Black creatives, educators, and activists.

Photo by Elliot Guilbe.