Lydia Östberg Diakité
About/Bio
Lydia Östberg Diakité is an artist whose practice explores emotional, political and fictional landscapes through choreography, performance, video, text, and installation. Working with intuitive knowledge and poetic association, her work moves through layered gestures, fragmented narratives and sampled elements to question and explore how experiences live in and through the body. Diakité’s ongoing practice centers on the body’s capacity to hold, transform, and resist, opening up spaces between memory, representation, and existing.
Based in Copenhagen, Diakité graduated from the Danish National School of Performing Arts in Dance and Choreography in 2017. Her work has been presented in a range of institutional and independent contexts, including Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Nikolaj Kunsthal (Copenhagen), Berlin Biennale 11 (Berlin), Impulstanz (Vienna), MDT (Stockholm), Dansehallerne (Copenhagen), and Arsenic (Lausanne), among others.
In 2024, Diakité received the Ung Dansk Fotografi award at Fotografisk Center (Copenhagen), and in 2021, was awarded the Impulstanz Young Choreographer Award for Fiebre, a collaborative work with Tamara Alegre and Marie Ursin. In recent years, she has also been a recipient of working grants from the Danish and Swedish Arts Foundations.
During the last 5 years Diakité works as a dramaturg within the expanded field of choreography and has been developing over 10 productions spread out over Europe. That many have gotten international recognition and acclaim.
Collaboration is central to Diakité’s practice, emphasizing community building and creating new realities together. She has worked with artists including BamBam Frost, Adam Seid Tahir, Anita Beikpour, Dina El Kaisy Freimuth to name a few. In 2019, together with Emilie Gregersen, they co-founded Dance Cooperative, an artist-run studio and platform for dance and choreography in Copenhagen, now maintained and organized by a group of 12 artists. Diakité is also a member of The Union, a collective working to build decolonial and anti-racist discourse in the Danish arts sector.