Lydie Diakhaté’s professional activities

Lydie Diakhaté, Film Producer & Director, Art Program Curator and Art Critic

Lydie Diakhaté’s work focuses on producing and disseminating African and African Diaspora films and other arts. Her professional path leads her to work regularly on 3 continents: Europe, Africa and the United States. She has written extensively about the arts and cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora.
She also co-founded and co-directed the Real Life Documentary Festival in Accra from 2006 to 2011.

During my career I developed strong partnerships and worked with prestigious institutions as:

New York University, Cornell University, The Metropolitan Museum, National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC)/USA, Discovery Channel/USA, Walter Mosley/USA; French Embassies and Alliances Françaises, Quai Branly/Paris, Ecole des Beaux Arts/Paris, Femis/Paris, Agnès bFoundation; Göethe Instituts; Prince Claus Fondation/Neitherland; Africalia/Belgium; The Algerian Ministry of Culture; the Ghanaian institutions NAFTI (National Film and Television Institute), Legon University, TV3, GTV (National Ghanaian Broadcast) and TV Africa…

FILM PRODUCTIONS

Film Producer & Director – Founding Member of K’a Yéléma Productions  

–        In production

  • Ancestors (working title – feature length). A documentary, co-directed by Lydie Diakhaté and Susan Gray,

–        Last productions

  • The Lost Ancestors (16′, 2021).A documentary, co-directed by Susan Gray and Lydie Diakhaté, co-produced by Linda Matchan and Lydie Diakhaté. Northern Light Productions – Boston (USA, 2021).Installation at The Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum, Montgomery, Alabama/USA. Collection of the Pulitzer Center for Education.
  • Slave Routes: The Long Memory (90’, US, 2019). Co-directors Lydie Diakhaté and the late poet Jane Cortez.
  • Some Bright Morning: The Art of Melvin Edwards (49′, US/France, January 2016), directed and produced  by Lydie Diakhaté.

–      Documentaries produced by Lydie Diakhaté

  • Global Education in New Orleans, Tanzania, Colombia, and Bangladesh (2022, forth coming). Field producer
  • Negritude: A Dialogue between Wole Soyinka and Senghor, (52 mins., France/USA/Germany/Portugal, 2015).
  • Edouard Glissant: One World in Relation (52 min., France/USA, 2010).
  • Zao (60min., Republic of Congo/France, 2009). Field producer. Director, David-Pierre Fila.
  • Maison Tropicale, Documentary (58mins, US/France/Portugal, 2008).
  • Who is afraid of Ngugi? (83 min., Kenya.USA, 2006). Jury Award at the ZIFF 2007.
  • Conakry kas (82min., Guinée/France/USA, 2004). First price Golden Dhow at the Zanzibar International Film Festival 2004. Award of the Best Fiction/Documentary (grand prix de la section TV & Video, FESPACO 2005).
  • Malick Sidibe (16min., Mali/France/USA, 2003).
  • Bamako Sigi Kan (76min., Mali/France/USA, 2002).

 

CULTURAL EVENTS & PROGRAMS (Selection)

FESTIVALS

  • Curator for the film program at the Comorian Contemporary Art Festival (November 2022 & 2024);
  • (T)HERE: A Global Festival of Arts, Culture & Ideas – Celebrating Benin. Purchase College, September 27 – 29, 2018.

A three day festival & conference devoted to the culture and history of Benin and introducing Purchase’s international commitments across all schools and areas, took place at The Performing Arts Center(PAC), The Neuberger Museum of Art, and other campus venues. Guests included: Angélique Kidjo, the three-time Grammy Award-winning singer, activist, and humanitarian; Marie-Cécile Zinsou, the founder-director of the Zinsou Foundation in Benin; the Benin International Musical (BIM)ensemble for a concert featuring their unique Beninese blend of voodoo rhythms, traditional songs, and electronic melodies; Hector Sonon, beninese political cartoonist, illustrator.

  • REAL LIFE DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL. Founding director of the Real Life Documentary Festival in Ghana (2006 – 2012)

The festival has embraced three focal points since its inception. First, it provides a forum for showcasing innovative and historical documentaries on African and African Diasporic communities and issues. Moreover, with the West African Documentary Forum, it seeks to shape the training of younger generations of filmmakers, particularly in Africa through workshops at the National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI), and to develop a digital archiving program with the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, New York University. Furthermore, the festival has initiated a visual literacy campaign among high school students by training them in photography and basic documentary skills.

The festival with its 6 editions has showcased more than 300 films, and brought together filmmakers from over 15 African countries, Haiti, Jamaica, France, England, Germany and the United States. To name a few: William Greaves, St Clair Bourne, Jihan el Tahir, Adama Ulrich, Sam Pollard, Kwa Ansah,Noo Saro-Wiwa, Jean-Paul Colleyn and John Akomfrah.

The objective was to stimulate Africans and the Diaspora to document their own histories while exchanging film vocabularies, methods and contexts with filmmakers from Africa and other continents.

EXHIBITIONS

  •  Collector’s choice: Abidjan in the 1970’s, Paul Kodjo photographs the Ivorian Miracle. A photo exhibition curated by Isabel Wilcox and Lydie Diakhaté (1:54 Fair, New York – May 2019)
  • Amanié, What’s New? A series of film and photo material shot 35 years ago in the village of Aby on a lagoon in Ivory Coast, West Africa. Display at the public space Kimmel Center Windows of New York University. Sept. 7th – Oct. 18th, 2017.
  • L’Allée de la Reine is an installation of a series of monumental sculptures in wood by Diagne Chanel, displayed at the Dakar City Hall garden, during the Dak’Art Biennale (May/June, 2016).
  • Alien Script, Drawings by Walter Mosley. An outdoor series of 18 large-scale drawings from Walter Mosley’s sketchbooks displayed at the NYU/Kimmel Center Windows.
  • The World of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, and his object teaching (Kimmel Center Windows, NYU, 2012).
  • Remembering Downtown, a series of short films that documents the Downtown New York art scene from the 1970s through the 1990s. in partnership with NYU’s Grey Art Gallery and Fales Library & Special Collections for the Festival of Ideas for the New City organized by the New Museum, May 4-8, 2011.
  • Stars of Ethiopia. A solo photo exhibition with Chester Higgins. Kimmel Center, NYU, March 1–May 8, 2011.
  • Collaboration to The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Sept. 31, 2008 – March 29, 2009); and the parallel exhibition The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art, on view at the Grey Art Gallery of New York University (September 16 – December 6, 2008). And the curating of a  film program at the MET related to the event.
  • Algiers PANAF: 1969 – 2009. A traveling photo exhibition on the 2nd PANAF (Panafrican cultural festival in Algiers) at the University of the District of Columbia, in Washington DC March 8 – April 15, 2011); The Institute of African American Affairs at New York University (April- June 2010).
  • Nomads with no Cause – Refugees with no Tomorrow, a series of photographs from Darfur by Terry Deborah at the Institute of African American Affairs at New York University (February 23 –  March 25, 2011).

ART PROGRAMS

A selection

  • Black Portraiture: The Black Body in the West (Paris January 17 – 20, 2013), an international conference, the fifth in a series organized by Harvard University and NYU since 2004. Lilian Thuram was the Guest of Honor.
  • Symposium / Perspectives on Algerian Cinema – Film & Conference at the Smithsonian Museum, Washington DC (Sunday February 20th, 2011). With Danny Glover as Guest of Honor.
  • Can Documentaries Change the World? Film and workshop program at the iREPRESENT International Film Festival, January 20-23, 2011 in Lagos/Nigeria.
  • Edouard Glissant: One World in Relation. Festival International de Théâtre d’Avignon Juillet 2010.
  • Reprise of Real Life Documentary Festival: Conference and film programming at Cornell University. February & April 2010; November 2007.
  • Africans Screens: New Perspectives in African Cinema, March and April 2009 in Lisbon, Portugal.
  • Here & Now: African and African American Art and Film Conference, The 2nd African-American Art Conference, at New York University, 15-18 October, 2007.

 

LAST PUBLICATIONS

(A selection – See more in the Category ‘Publications’)

  • “As Terras do Fim do Mundo at the Walter Collection”, NYC, essay in Jo Ractliffe: Photographs 1980s–Now, Steidl/The Walter Collection, Neu-Ulm and New York, March 2021.
  • “Melvin Edwards : Parcours d’un sculpteur et poétique de la relation”, Présence Africaine, Paris, Mai 2016.
  • “Melvin Edwards and the Poetic of a Blacksmith,” Wasafiri Magazine, Routledge (August 2015); republished in Black Renaissance USA, May 2016.
  • “Salif Traoré, photographe sans frontière / Photographer without borders”, in Salif Traoré Monographie. Editions de L’Oeil, Paris, 2011.

EDUCATION

• MA in Museum Studies, The Graduate School of Arts and Science, New York University (2009). Thesis entitled: The Role of Museums in Writing and Shaping Modern African Art.

• Diploma in Visual Anthropology, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (2005). Thesis entitled: Contemporary African Visual Art: The Art Work In Dialogue With The City.

• Diploma of European Cultural Management, Gréta des arts et du spectacle, Paris (1988)

• Languages

Native language: French.

Foreign languages: English; Spanish (Lycée Français de Bogotà Colombia).