In Conversation: Miatta Kawinzi with Chrislyn Laurore
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
724 S. 12th Street
Omaha, NE 68102
Listen and learn from exhibiting artist Miatta Kawinzi and Haitian American anthropologist Chrislyn Laurore, who will focus on diasporic identity, material memory, and how storytelling can function as an embodied archive. Their dialogue will connect Kawinzi’s exploration of cultural lineage and ecological interdependence with broader questions of belonging and change within the African Diaspora.
Admission is free; RSVPs are encouraged.
Miatta Kawinzi is a multi-disciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, writer, and educator. Her research-informed practice explores cultural hybridity, memory, freedom dreaming, and ecologies of possibility within inner and outer landscapes. Her practice spans installation, sculpture, still and moving images, sound, painting, and poetics. She is interested in illuminating African/Diasporic points of connection, transformation, and continuity across place, space, and time. Of Liberian and Kenyan heritage, Kawinzi was raised in the US South and is based in NYC.
Her work has been presented at Smack Mellon, the Africa Center, PS122 Gallery, CUE Art Foundation, and the Studio Museum in Harlem (all in NYC); Knoxville Museum of Art (TN); Pan African Film Festival with LACMA, and ICA Los Angeles (CA); New Orleans Film Festival (LA); and Des Moines Art Center (IA). Her work is included in collections at the Studio Museum in Harlem (Harlem Postcards, NYC), Art Connects New York, and Art in Embassies (Liberia). Her practice has received press in Hyperallergic, Filmmaker Magazine, and MoMA Magazine.
Kawinzi’s work has been supported by Creative Capital, Jerome Foundation, Harpo Foundation, Artadia, and New York Foundation for the Arts. Select residencies include Àsìkò Art School (Egypt), MacDowell (NH), Residency Unlimited (NYC), Cité internationale des arts (France), Bemis Center (NE), and the Bag Factory (South Africa). She holds an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College, and a BA in Interdisciplinary Art & Cultural Theory from Hampshire College. She is currently on faculty at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Photo courtesy of the artist.
Chrislyn Laurore is a William Fontaine Fellow and PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania studying the public memory and history of slavery, particularly its curation in museums, monuments, memorials, and archaeological sites. She is interested in the biopolitical economy of African diaspora heritage tourism and its effects on contemporary Black identities and nationalisms. Her research explores how ensuing Back-to-Africa heritage discourses and practices sustain, invent, and reproduce geographic entanglements.
Miatta Kawinzi: An Alphabet of Unfolding (installation view). Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, June 5 to September 13, 2026. Photo: Colin Conces.
Funding for this program is provided by:
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Contemporary Arts
724 S. 12th Street
Omaha, NE 68102
402.341.7130
info@bemiscenter.org