Critical Dreaming: Feminist Performances Across The Indigenous Americas

Monday, February 23, 2026 

Lunch at 1:30 pm

Talk at 5:45 pm

Hutchinson Hall 

School of Drama, UW Seattle 

This talk will detail insights from Dr. Mengesha's new book Critical Dreaming, which is a transnational study of Indigenous artists that stages the urgency of embodied ways of knowing amidst the colonial decimation of culture, life, and land. In the 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), and US and Canadian boarding/residential schools' practices led to an increase in cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women from the US-Mexico border, Guatemala, Canada, and the United States. Indigenous artists aiming to recontextualize these state-sponsored instances of violence created works grappling with time, ancestry, and relationality. Dr. Mengesha interprets the works of these artists Indigenous contexts through an aesthetic frame she calls "Critical Dreaming."

Using methods from performance studies, gender studies, and Indigenous studies, Critical Dreaming considers artists as expert world makers. Dr. Mengesha examines selected works by Lara Kramer, Regina Jose Galindo, Rebecca Belmore, Monique Mojica, LeAnne Howe, and Sky Hopinka, demonstrating how each materializes alternative modes of experiencing time, making kin, and communing with land. Revealing the long and interconnected patterns of feminicide across the Americas, the talk will detail how contemporary feminist artists use performance to sustain life amid devastating attempts at extermination.

Lily Mengesha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, and Affiliate faculty in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University which occupies Massachusett and Nipmuc territories.