About
Harbourfront Centre’s KUUMBA Festival, presented by TD Bank Group through the Bank’s Corporate Citizenship platform, the TD Ready Commitment, is Toronto’s largest and longest-running Black Futures Month Festival. This year, KUUMBA celebrates a legacy milestone: its 30th anniversary. For decades, the festival has been a vital platform for celebrating Black futures, embodying joyful expression through the vibrant integration of artists, creators, and audiences in the multidisciplinary fields of music, theatre, dance, spoken word and more.
We look to transcend historical narratives of trauma and repression, uniting the community and sparking exchange around the creative and intellectual achievements of the Black diaspora. Cultivating an inclusive atmosphere that centres on meaningful dialogues and celebratory expressions, KUUMBA recognizes the paramount contributions of Black creators shaping the future of art, culture and society.
Full festival lineup coming soon.
Festival Events
KUUMBA 365
Harbourfront Centre’s KUUMBA 365, presented by TD Bank Group through the Bank’s Corporate Citizenship platform, the TD Ready Commitment, is a dynamic initiative celebrating Black cultures all year long. In partnership with The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, the annual program invites new artists each February to explore and create works through the Black cultural lens, with commissions centred on the disciplines of literary, spoken word, dance and theatre arts. Committed to investing in Black futures, KUUMBA 365 proudly supports the transformative work and achievements of Afro-Canadian artists today, tomorrow and always.
Coming in 2025
The second edition of KUUMBA 365 invites four artists to respond to The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery’s Fall 2024 Exhibitions. Choreographers Katlyn Addison, Lua Shayenne, Esie Mensah and Syreeta Hector choose one or more works to respond to through the Black cultural lens using dance as the artistic medium of choice. Their creative process is documented through diary entries and personal interviews, culminating in a live dance performance. Full details coming soon.
Syreeta Hector is a dance artist in Toronto, Ontario. Her solo work, Black Ballerina, focuses on the dualities within one’s identity and her blackness and indigeneity in classical ballet. This solo gained recognition at the SummerWorks Festival, won the Stratford Festival Lab Award for Research and Creation and was nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore award in Outstanding Performance by an Individual. While she continues to tour Black Ballerina, Hector is developing a new dance theatre work, which will be the series’ second chapter.
She has been commissioned to make ensemble works for Mocean Dance (Nova Scotia) and ProArteDanza (Ontario). She recently created a new work for Kittiwake Dance Theatre (Newfoundland). Although performance and creation endeavours remain a priority for Hector, she derives an equal measure of inspiration by teaching movement and choreography. She is honoured to be a part of the Department of Dance as an Assistant Professor at York University.
Esie Mensah is a member of the Canadian Guild of Stage Directors and Choreographers as well as a two-time Dora-nominated artist who has worked with Rihanna, Drake, Janelle Monae, Nelly Furtado and Arcade Fire, along with historic brands like Holt Renfrew, Coca-Cola, TIFF, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Raptors and more. In theatre, Mensah has worked on Russian Play, Victory, 1837: The Farmers’ Revolt (Shaw Festival), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Soulpepper), Dixon Road (Musical Stage/Obsidian), New Monuments (Canadian Stage) and Serving Elizabeth (Theatre Aquarius).
Mensah’s original creations include the ZAYO, Dora-nominated Shades and films A Revolution of Love and TESSEL, each a testament to her creativity and innovation in the arts. She was recently commissioned by Canada’s National Ballet School for Assemblée International, where she co-choreographed the world premiere of The Call with Robert Binet on a cast of local and international students. Mensah also served as the choreographer for Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha: A Musical Reimagining, a production presented by TOLive, Luminato Festival and Volcano Theatre.
Katlyn Addison was born in Ontario, Canada. At ten, she began her professional ballet training at the National Ballet School of Canada. She continued training at Quinte Ballet School of Canada, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Boston Ballet and the Houston Ballet Ben Stevenson Academy.
In 2021, Addison made history when she became the first black female Principal Artist in Ballet West’s 58-year history. That same year, she was awarded the Performing Arts Fellowship Award by the Utah Division of Fine Arts & Museums.
Addison has danced classical, neoclassical and contemporary works, including adaptations from John Cranko’s Romeo & Juliet and Onegin; Adam Sklute’s Swan Lake, Ben Stevenson’s Dracula, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and La Bayadere; and many other ballets. She has also performed in several world premieres, including Christopher Bruce’s Grinning in Your Face; Stanton Welch’s Medieval Babes; Val Caniparoli’s The Lottery and Dances for Lou; Nicolo Fonte’s Rite of Spring and Carmina Burana and Africa Guzman’s Sweet and Bitter.
Addison has also pursued finding her choreographic voice in several works, including creating new ballets for the Utah Arts Festival (Unnamed), the Ballet West Academy and the University of Utah Dance Department (Saint-George, The Composer, Frenchmen, and Creator). In early 2022, Kansas City Ballet premiered Katlyn’s new work, Sanctuary, and in December of 2022, her work, The Cuban Cavalier, premiered with the Gateway Chamber Orchestra. In May 2023, she created a work for Bayou Ballet (Poem). Her work for Ballet Jorgen, which also premiered in May 2023 (There Were TWO), is currently touring Canada.
Addison has danced and acted in Miu Miu Woman’s Tales, a short film that premiered at the 2017 Venice Film Festival and appeared on the Prada Miu Miu website. She was also featured in an episode of “Let’s Talk Utah,” produced by the Utah Office of Tourism in the fall of 2021, and in an episode of the Conversations in Dance podcast in February 2024.
She is involved in many passion projects and is dedicated to using her platform to give back to her community and to help raise the voices of other minority artists. Addison has volunteered her time for The Redlining Project, an initiative drawing attention to injustices created by redlining voter districts and Ballet West’s I CAN DO Program Curly ME, which supports young girls of colour and Morning Star Middle School and Ridgewood Elementary School, both in Ontario, Canada. She also serves on the board of directors for the Utah Black Artist Collective.
As the Artistic Director, choreographer, curator and producer of LSDC, Lua Shayenne’s creative leadership has been recognized with a K.M. Hunter Dance Award nomination and the 2013 BMO Seeds Fund Award for Artists working in the community. She is the creator and interpreter of the dance theatre children’s series Tales and Dances Around the Baobab, of which Yassama and The Beaded Calabash is the fourth tale.
Through LSDC, Shayenne boldly envisioned and launched the YENSA Festival in 2022, a biennial festival highlighting the incredible multiplicity of Black women dance practitioners and nurturing an environment where they can have substantive conversations, take risks and be given due recognition.
Her performing highlights include HOLOSCENES tours in the United States, the UK, Abu Dhabi, Australia, Italy and Toronto. She teaches at Toronto Metropolitan University’s dance program and brings African dance, music, storytelling and culture to grassroots organizations and schools across Canada and Europe.
2024
For the inaugural edition of KUUMBA 365, three artists responded to The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery’s Fall 2023 Exhibitions in a series of videos. Artists Randell Adjei, Dwayne Morgan and Paulina O’Kieffe-Anthony chose one or more works to respond to through the Black cultural lens using spoken word. Their creative process was documented through diary entries and personal interviews.
KUUMBA presented by
