Emilie “Zila” Jabouin is a multi-talented dance artist, researcher, emerging producer, and story teller living in Tkaronto, Turtle Island (Toronto, Canada), who produces stories for collective liberation and social transformation. Emilie has worked with Ballet Creole, Kashedance, Ronald Taylor Dance, Mafa Dance Village, Lua Shayenne Dance Company, and Esie Mensah in traditional and contemporary Caribbean and African dance forms merged with Ballet and modern dance techniques; traditional South African and Guinean dances; and African contemporary and fusion forms, including some African street dances. Training since 2020 with master dancer and drummer Peniel Guerrier (NYC), as the inaugural student of his professional KASE DANS training program, Emilie reconnects to Haitian folk culture as the foundation of her art practice (drumming, dancing, and singing), and promotes the healing characteristics of Haitian folk dance as she describes during her CTV interview in the Social. In 2020, Emilie also founded Do Gwe dance and research, an art-based company that merges dance and socio-historical research into artistic productions. She won artistic creation and professional development grants from the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and dance Immersion that provided her necessary support to start creating her own work. Since 2022, Emilie has been working on a full-length piece, The Release, about Afro-Caribbean women, gender non-binary and trans birthing persons’ experiences with [interrupted] pregnancies and bodily autonomy; sections of which she has performed in Ayiti (Haiti), Canada, and the United States between 2022 and 2024. Emilie recently completed an artistic residency in Barbados in August 2024 where she researched, immersed herself, and prepared a solo dance that reflected local stories and realities, “We Loud with Quiet.” She performed it at Pebbles Beach – a historical location tied to the arrival of the ships carrying enslaved African peoples to the island. Emilie’s most recent work in development, “Jérémie, au coeur de ma vie,“ about the Vêpres jérémiennes, a massacre that took place in the South of Haïti in 1964 under Duvalier is a result of her one-month residency during the Festival Quatre Chemins completed last December 2024. Emilie aspires to produce more shows as an emerging producer and a uniquely positioned dancer/researcher who thinks in terms of the bigger picture and deeper messages. She produced her first show, “Un Voyage à travers la danse/ A Journey through dance” in December 2023 by curating four Black women performers’ stories (including her own) in relationship to the French language, identity, and navigating their environments through dance, while co-producing the music. Emilie is also featured as a dancer, drummer, and singer in the critically-acclaimed work of Dr. Camille Turner’s NAVE, a groundbreaking multimedia installation on Canada’s historical involvement with the enslavement of African peoples that found connections between Senegal, Hispaniola (where Emilie has ancestral connections), and Canada in the 1700s. The National Gallery of Canada acquired the piece in 2023 following its national success. Emilie also teaches weekly Haitian dance classes for the public. A doctor of communication studies, a writer, and public speaker, Emilie has written peer-reviewed articles, including “Black Women Dancers, Jazz Culture and ‘Show Biz’,” which received an honourable mention for the Canadian Historical Association Jean-Fecteau prize in 2022. Her academic and artistic research interests overlap and include celebrating Black women in the Americas, documenting intellectual and performance histories, exploring the body, archives and newspapers, promoting wellness and discussing Black liberation movements.