Proof of registration, via a QR code on your phone or on paper, will be required to enter Reid Hall. Entry will be refused to those who are not registered. Please note that access will not be permitted 15 minutes after the start of the event.
This event will be held in English.
Co-sponsored by the Columbia Global Paris Center and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
This concert is made possible in part thanks to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.
With additional support from: the Columbia University African American and African Diaspora Studies Department, the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University, the Columbia University Department of Music, the Edwin H. Case Chair in American Music at Columbia University, and Columbia University Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin.
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An evening conceived in dialogue with the exhibition “Paris noir: Circulations artistiques et luttes anticoloniales, 1950-2000” at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Program
Part 1
4:40 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Audience check-in (part 1)
5:00 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.
Panel discussion
Featuring Manthia Diawara, Anne Lafont, and Zineb Sedira. Moderated by Robert G. O’Meally.
6:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.
Intermission and cocktail reception
Part 2
7:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.
Audience check-in (part 2)
7:30 p.m. - 9:15 p.m.
Musical performances, videos, and panel discussion
George E. Lewis: My Afrodiaspora in Paris
With video excerpts and references from:
- Art Ensemble of Chicago
- Stan Douglas, Hors-champs, video installation, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1992
- Video interview with Tyshawn Sorey
- Tyshawn Sorey, Perle Noire: Méditations pour Joséphine, performed by Julia Bullock with the International Contemporary Ensemble, Lincoln Center, New York City, 2016
- Rainbow Family (telefilm, 1984, IRCAM), Michel Davaud, dir.
- Michel Fabre and John A. Williams, A Street Guide to African-Americans in Paris (1996)
Three works for string quartet:
Alyssa Regent, La Sérénité (2023)
Malik Mezzadri, AlyZz (2016)
George Lewis, String Quartet 4.5, “Partial Truth” (2022)
Performed by L’Itineraire: Mathilde Lauridon, Alexandra Greffin-Klein, violins; Camille Havel, viola; Florian Lauridon, cello
Courtney Bryan, Blessed (2023)
Damian Norfleet, voice; Courtney Bryan, piano
Roundtable
Featuring Courtney Bryan, Malik Mezzadri, Damian Norfleet, and Alyssa Regent, moderated by George E. Lewis
Speakers and Performers
Part 1
Manthia Diawara is a writer and filmmaker born in Mali, West Africa. He is Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at New York University and director emeritus of the Institute of African American Affairs. His films include Édouard Glissant, One World in Relation (2010), Negritude: A Dialogue between Wole Soyinka and Senghor (2016), An Opera of the World (2017), and most recently, Towards the New Baroque of Voices (2021).
Anne Lafont is professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris specializing in the art and material culture of the modern Black Atlantic. Her book L'art et la Race. L'Africain (tout) contre l'œil des Lumières received the Prix Littéraire Fetkann Maryse Condé and the 2020 Prix Vitale et Arnold Blokh. She has contributed to museum exhibitions such as Le Modèle noir de Géricault à Matisse at the Musée d’Orsay (2019). Her latest publication, with François-Xavier Fauvelle, is L'Afrique et le monde. Histoires renouées de la préhistoire au XXIe siècle.
Zineb Sedira is an artist born in Paris and working between Algeria, Paris, and London. Known for her photographs and video installations, her next solo exhibition, “Standing Here Wondering Which Way to Go,” opens at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon in September 2025. In 2022, she won special mention at the Venice 59th Biennale for her installation Dreams Have No Titles. Her work is held in collections including the Guggenheim, the Pompidou, the Tate, and Arts Council England.
Robert G. O’Meally is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, where he has taught for 35 years. His essays appear in the catalog accompanying “Paris Noir” (Pompidou). His books include Antagonistic Cooperation: Jazz, Collage, Fiction, and the Shaping of African American Culture; Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey; Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday. O’Meally has curated exhibitions for the Smithsonian and Jazz at Lincoln Center. His new book is A Very Short Introduction to Jazz.
Part 2
Courtney Bryan is the Albert and Linda Mintz Professor of Music at Newcomb College in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. She is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow whose other honors include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, American Academy Rome Prize, United States Artists Fellowship (2020), and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship. Her work has been presented at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Miller Theatre, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, and Walt Disney Concert Hall, performed by New York Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, Opera Philadelphia, and London Sinfonietta.
Since the 1980s, Stan Douglas (b. 1960) has created films, photographs, and other multidisciplinary projects that investigate the parameters of their respective mediums. His ongoing inquiry into technology’s role in image making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory, has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide. Works by the artist are held in major museum collections worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and in 2021, Douglas was knighted as a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture.
L'Itinéraire is a leading European musical ensemble, known for its innovation and its exploration of the limits of sound, from acoustic saturation to electronics. Since its foundation, it has created hundreds of major works and collaborated with renowned artists. The ensemble stands out for its spirit of adventure, its artistic excellence and its international collaborations, while actively engaging in the cultural education of young people.
George Lewis, Professor of Music at Columbia University, is an American composer, musicologist and trombonist. He is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, as well as a 2002 MacArthur Fellow and a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin. Further honors include the Doris Duke Artist Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is regarded as a pioneer in the creation of improvising computer programs. Lewis is a 2024-25 Fellow of the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
Malik Mezzadri (Magic Malik), flutist-composer of Guadeloupean origin, studied with Jean-Louis Beaumadier at the CRR Pierre Barbizet in Marseille. After winning a Premier Prix, he founded the Magic Malik Orchestra in Paris. Mezzadri is known for his extensive collaborations as performer, improviser, arranger and composer, as well as for his research into languages for composition and improvisation. Mezzadri was resident composer at the Villa Médicis (2011-2012), and resident at the Abbey de Royaumont (2015-2018). He was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2015.
Damian Norfleet is an interdisciplinary performer-composer-improviser who has performed at Lincoln Center, Roulette, National Sawdust, Kaufman Music Center, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, Reid Hall in Paris, and multiple Off-Broadway theaters. He is a Fellow at the Montalvo Art Center’s Lucas Artists Residency Program and a 2024 Composing Fellow in the Gabriela Ortiz Composition Studio. He has been principal vocalist with the Glimmerglass Opera and Portland Opera Conservatory, and is a Barrymore Award-winning and Planet Connections Theatre Award-winning actor who played a featured role in the Drama Desk Award-nominated production of the Threepenny Opera.
Alyssa Regent is a French-Guadeloupean composer. Her works have been performed at the Lucerne Music Festival (Switzerland), and she was a resident composer at the “Always, Already, There” Incubator for Afrodiasporic Music at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and was featured on the recent France Musique podcast “Decoloniser la musique contemporaine?” Regent has composed music for Yarn/Wire and International Contemporary Ensemble, and studied composition with Suzanne Farrin, David Fulmer, Marcos Balter, Seth Cluett, Zosha Di Castri, George Lewis and Georg Friedrich Haas. She is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at Columbia University.
Composer-performer Tyshawn Sorey, Presidential Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow who received the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Music. He has composed for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Lucerne Festival Players, International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Davone Tines, and Alarm Will Sound, and has performed with Anthony Braxton, Vijay Iyer, John Zorn, Roscoe Mitchell, Julia Bullock, Klangforum Wien, and Wadada Leo Smith. His works have been performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Ojai Music Festival, and Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center.
Venue
This event will take place in Reid Hall’s Grande Salle Ginsberg-LeClerc, built in 1912 and extensively renovated in 2023 thanks to the generous support of Judith Ginsberg and Paul LeClerc.
Reid Hall, the Columbia Global Paris Center, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination are not responsible for the views and opinions expressed by their speakers and guests.
