About the Film

Where My Documentary Voice Emerged

Borders of Blackness: Diaspora via the Indian Ocean (2017) is Nadia’s first film, created as part of her honors project at Barnard College, where she majored in Africana Studies and Dance. This debut work laid the foundation for her continuing commitment to bridging scholarship, performance, and lived experience.

The film is a performative, auto-ethnographic multimedia project that traverses questions of race, ethnicity, and cultural identity through the Tanzanian side of her multi-national, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural family. Rooted in ethnography and oral history, it centers the memories and reflections of her Punjabi Indian grandmother, interwoven with Nadia’s own poetic narration as she navigates the layered meanings of Blackness.

Through dance, she embodies ancestral and cultural knowledge, tracing how geography, memory, and movement shape the multiplicity of Black diasporic experience across the Indian Ocean.

Drawing from Black feminist anthropology, diaspora studies, and experimental documentary traditions, Borders of Blackness is both personal and collective—grounded in lived family histories while mapping new possibilities for narrating diaspora.