Poetry & born among mirrors, a rememory with Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Rachel Eliza Griffiths, interior with my flesh, 2025. © Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Courtesy the artist

Event details Friday, October 16, 20266:30 pm

Dia Chelsea537 West 22nd StreetNew York, New York

Free. Spaces are limited; register for the event here.

born among mirrors, a rememory is a living poem that centers the multidimensionality of Black embodiment and ritual as pathways to healing and joy. Created collaboratively with flutist and composer Jane Rigler, Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s performance combines original experimental soundscapes of the natural world with poems, including those by Lucille Clifton, Roberta Flack, Federico García Lorca, and Muriel Rukeyser. This event also features movement along with video projections that collapse the past, present, and future of a recovered spiritual and ancestral village. Participants are invited to witness and meditate in a space of bodily rhythm, imagery, and sound.

The artist would like to thank Gioconda Belli, Birdee, Heaven Booker, Sidney Clifton, Kamilah N. Foreman, Suzanne Gardinier, Keely Garfield, Kimberly Golding, Jane Rigler, William L. Rukeyser, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Carla Villaorduña, and WildHeart Center for Performance and Embodiment Practice for their assistance with the development of the piece.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, novelist, memoirist, and visual artist. She is the recipient of a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Legacy Award and a Paterson Poetry Prize (both 2021) and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award (2020). Her work has been published in New Yorker, New York Times, British Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Best American Poetry. Griffiths has received fellowships from numerous organizations, including the Cave Canem Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Kimbilio for Black Fiction, Merwin Conservancy, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo. Her debut novel, Promise (2023), received a Kirkus Star and was awarded Best Book of the Year by the Chicago Public Library. Her highly acclaimed debut memoir, The Flower Bearers (2026), was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. She lives in New York.

Jane Rigler is a flutist and composer whose works weave movement, language, and ancestral song into immersive soundworlds at the intersection of acoustic experimentation and Deep Listening® practice. Her international career spans electronic music festivals, artist residencies, and collaborative projects across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia, with recordings on Dewdrops Records, Neuma Records, Porter Records, and Tzadik. A Fulbright scholar and U.S.–Japan Friendship Creative Artist fellow, she brings to each performance a listening practice rooted in both rigorous musical training and ecological curiosity. She lives in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.