The Ivorian choreographer Nadia Beugré (Adibjan, 1981) started her career in 1995 at the Dante Theatre in Abidjan, where she trained in traditional dance. Two years later, she became a co-founder of Béatrice Kombé’s groundbreaking, all-female dance ensemble, TchéTché. They toured together through Africa, Europe and North America, until Kombé’s death in 2007. Beugré worked through the loss of her mentor in her internationally acclaimed debut solo performance, Un espace vide: moi. Subsequently, Beugré immersed herself in contemporary dance at the École des Sables in Senegal. In 2009, she was accepted at Ex.e.r.ce., Mathilde Monnier’s programme for talented, up-and-coming choreographers at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier. Beugré developed an idiosyncratic oeuvre that has been relentlessly questioning identities, assignations and borders, focusing on those on the margins, the ones she called ‘the stranded’. The New York Times wrote in praise of her work: ‘It’s harrowing, both in action and sound; Ms. Beugré knows how to make a crowd trust her just as, in a split second, she knows how to knock the air out of people. She’s wild, like the wind.’ She has also performed as a dancer in works by fellow choreographers Seydou Boro (Burkina Faso), Alain Buffard (France), Dorothée Munyaneza (France/Rwanda), Boris Charmatz (France) or in 2022 Robyn Orlin (South Africa). In France, Nadia Beugré is associate artist to the Briqueterie CDCN du Val-de-Marne and to ICI - CCN de Montpellier Occitanie.

A few years ago Nadia Beugré has founded her own dance company in Montpellier, Libr’Arts, a platform for production, touring but also training between France and Ivory Coast.