Black Dance of the Prairies:

Tracing the Experiences Through Archives and Interviews

Dunlop Art Gallery and Saskatchewan African Canadian Heritage Museum (SACHM) are pleased to host Seika Boye for a one-week research residency.

We invite the community to join us for engagements with Seika. For more information or to schedule an appointment, please contact Tomas Jonsson, Curator, Moving Image and Performance, at tjonsson@reginalibrary.ca

Dunlop Art Gallery and Saskatchewan African Canadian Heritage Museum (SACHM) are pleased to host Seika Boye for a one-week research residency. Seika Boye is a writer, scholar, educator, and artist whose practices revolve around dance, movement, Blackness, archives and museums, and embodied pedagogies. Seika’s exhibition It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1970 and Now invites contemporary performing, visual, and literary artists to respond to the archive and consider what the history of Black people dancing in Canada reveals about our contemporary moment. While in Saskatchewan, Seika will connect with local community and artists — either from or currently based in Saskatchewan — as part of this ongoing work. Her research will be used to develop a public programming in 2025 as part of the forthcoming exhibition Black Prairies at Dunlop Art Gallery.

Seika Boye is a writer, scholar, educator, and artist whose practices revolve around dance, movement, Blackness, archives and museums, and embodied pedagogies. She is an Assistant Professor and Founder/Director of the Institute for Dance Studies, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto

Seika has worked as a professional modern/postmodern dance artist; an archives and publishing assistant at Dance Collection Danse; and dance writer and editor for various publications. She continues to work as a dramaturg and consultant in the performing arts.

Dedicated to public scholarship, Seika curated the award winning archival exhibition It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1970 (2018) and co-curated Into the Light: Eugenics and Education in Southern Ontario (2019) She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2018), Toronto District School Board's African Heritage Educators’ Network Arts Honoree (2019) and a 2020 recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Heritage Trust Award (co-curator, Into the Light). Seika is a Co-Investigator on Gatherings: Oral and Archival Histories of Performance and Experiential Learning Fellow (2023-26), University of Toronto.

Seika lives and works in Toronto with her husband and their two sons.

Image credit: Craig Boyko. 

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