Afro-Diaspora dance is more than movement—it is memory, medicine, and community. For centuries, these traditions have carried ancestral wisdom, spirituality, and resilience, yet they’ve often been mischaracterized as primitive or chaotic. Christa Sylla, choreographer, cultural strategist, and founder of Nan Nkama Pan-African Drum and Dance Ensemble, invites us to see these forms for what they truly are: living repositories of knowledge. Her talk bridges ancient embodied practices with modern neuroscience, showing how dance encodes healing, spiritual connection, and communal memory. From pattern recognition to somatic research, science is finally affirming what these traditions have known all along: movement can restore, transform, and reconnect us.
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TALKS
Christa Sylla | Dancethropologist
Christa Sylla is a choreographer, cultural strategist, and embodied knowledge practitioner whose work centers Afro-Diaspora dance as a tool for restoration, ancestral reverence, and community transformation. She is the founder and director of Nan Nkama Pan-African Drum and Dance Ensemble, a company dedicated to preserving and evolving African-rooted movement traditions through performance, education, and community engagement. Based in Jacksonville since 2000, Christa has taught World Dance studies at secondary levels and African Dance Studies at university levels and has developed original curricula that honor the cultural integrity of African and Diaspora forms. Her work has been featured on the TEDx Jacksonville stage, recognized by the Florida Folklife Program, and supported by the City of Jacksonville for her contributions to arts and culture. Christa’s practice weaves ancestral wisdom with contemporary relevance, creating spaces where movement becomes a language of resistance, restoration, and reconnection.
