Award-winning playwright-performer, director-dramaturge and activist-scholar d’bi.young anitafrika is this year’s Lehan Family Activism & the Arts Lecturer, who will be speaking on the topic of “Dub Performance as Decolonial Praxis”. Book launch & signing to follow talk. 

An award-winning playwright-performer, director-dramaturge and activist-scholar, 
d’bi.young anitafrika is the author of 12 plays, seven albums and four poetry collections. Widely anthologised, this Siminovitch Prize finalist embodies, creates and teaches decolonial performance praxis on a global scale.

Read this new interview with d’bi

In this talk, they will connect their performance practice to the Anitafrika Method, exploring how they “decoliberate” — embodying liberation through decolonial action — in personhood, practice and pedagogy through theatre.


Culminating a PhD in Black womyn’s theatre
at London South Bank University, d’bi.young’s research centres on the epistemological, ontological, cosmological, ethical, aesthetic and somatic emancipation of the oppressed self, through theatre making.

The Anitafrika Method — a nurturant Black-queer-feminist pedagogy of transformation — offers global arts practitioners an intersectional framework of knowing, doing and being. They currently serve as lead faculty for training programs at Soulpepper and Obsidian theatre companies.

Following the talk, there will be a book launch & signing for dubbin poetry: the collected poems of d’bi.young anitafrika. 

The annual Lehan Family Activism & the Arts Lecture features a distinguished guest presenting ideas on how the arts is a catalyst for change in advancing the understanding and goals of various social justice topics.

Free

We acknowledge and respect the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Songhees and Xʷsepsəm/Esquimalt) Peoples on whose territory the university stands, and the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.