Founder of the renowned Zab Maboungou/Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata, artist-choreographer and performer, professor of philosophy and author, Zab Maboungou has distinguished herself on all fronts of artistic and cultural action: her contribution, remarkably, unites and transcends identities and genres, without ever diluting the knowledge and practices it has, with a consistency that has never been denied, innovated and developed with a view to proposing a living art, that is to say an art which beyond stories and communities, wants to stage beings and their time.
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Coming from Africa, from Congo-Brazzaville, where she grew up in a post-independence atmosphere during which she was introduced to dance, but born in France, in Paris, Zab Maboungou managed to translate and establish thanks to her works and its involvement in artistic and cultural development, another presence and another focus for the imagination.
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Through her art of movement, the principle of which she formulates with the LOKETO, Zab Maboungou wins the favor of the public by presenting a contemporary dance which knows that it is heir to tradition and which strikes by the quality of the presences._cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b -136bad5cf58d_
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An incomparable trainer and mentor, she set up the Center Création Danse Nyata Nyata (located on boul. St-Laurent) which today welcomes its third generation of artists who are educated and sensitive to the challenges of the contemporary, transcontinental and diasporic world. . 
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Its training program (PEFAPDA: Training program and artistic and professional training in dance) has been able to place historically, philosophically and didactically the major contributions of Afro-descendant populations as well as those of the African diaspora, thus honoring the great masters from whom she learned among others (Lucky Zébila from Congo, Babatunde Olatundji from Nigeria) and the musical and dance traditions of global Africa. 

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If the well-known New York journalist and dance critic, Anna Kisselgolf, saw in this emblematic work, which is Incantation created in 1999, "a finely chiseled diamond...", it is because Zab Maboungou and his works, in the field of creation as well as that of training and teaching testify in many respects to this unique quality that she deploys at the heart of all her undertakings, and to which her colleagues in philosophy have also paid tribute (in 2012 ) namely that of an intelligence which is one with its object.

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A unique journey that reflects an aesthetic of great poetic power. More than twenty solos, and group pieces, music and dance (among which, the first, Réverdanse, very noted for musicality in 1995, Incantation, emblematic work, in 1997 until the most recent, Gestes Dé/ released in 2009 and Montreal by Night in 2010) show us a sharp musical and rhythmic art as well as a gesture that is at once rooted, vigorous and refined, with limpid and multiple trajectories presented on the biggest stages in the world, like the smallest ones. (Canada, United States, Korea, Italy, Germany, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Mexico, etc.).

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Zab Maboungou is recognized as a dance pioneer in Canada. She has received such a tribute twice, in 1993 and in 2011 from Dance Immersion, in Toronto, as part of a prestigious and unique event in the world, the International Association of Blacks in Dance Annual Conference.

She has also made a contribution to the development of the art of dance in Africa, where, chosen as a guest artist at Masa (Marché des arts vivants de la scène) by the Minister of Culture of Ivory Coast (1995-2002). She co-directed and facilitated the first large-scale Pan-African French-language choreographic workshop (1997), while the Ministry of culture of Cameroon paid her tribute twice for her “talent, creativity and all the efforts she has made for the outreach of theatrical art” (1997) as well as her huge contribution to the development of the art of dance” (2010).

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More recently, in 2010, she was honoured during the 5th Kriye Bode symposium devoted to the art of Haitian dance and drum and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater from Manhattan in New York and in 2011 by Collège Montmorency.

 

Already a laureate of Black History Month, she earned the Charles Biddle Award 2013, that highlights the exceptional contribution of an individual who immigrated to Quebec and whose personal or professional engagement is contributing to Quebec’s cultural and artistic development on the national or international scene. In January 2014, Zab Maboungou will receive the prestigious Martin Luther King Junior Achievement Award bestowed by the Black Theatre Workshop in Montreal in recognition of her body of work, which attests to her brilliant choreographic art.

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In 2015, Zab Maboungou/ Nyata Nyata Dance Company is the dance laureate of the 30th Grand Prix of the Montreal Art Council for the outstanding performance of the work, Mozongi, as part of the 25th anniversary at the SAT in 2014 and brilliantly performed by experienced interpreters.

In the same year, she’ll also be honored by Cultures croisées, and will become a member of the UNESCO’s International Dance Committee.

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Finally, to close that year, Nyata Nyata is the laureate of the first Montreal Art Council’s Cultural Diversity Award in Dance.
 

The Company is going to celebrate its 35 years of existence in 2022, and along with it, Zab Maboungou is renewing her commitment, which have made her a leading exponent in terms of art, culture and all the physical, intellectual and aesthetic development that have made her mark.