Professor Reid, is a dance historian who writes and teaches about West Indian migration, queer of color critique, and post-colonial Caribbean Black radicalism. Her work examines the choreographies and transnational political communities formed by state-affiliated concert dance companies in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana (1930-1976). 

In the workshop, students learned about dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham, the "matriarch and queen mother of Black dance,", who completed anthropological and ethnographic work in the West Indies after studying at Northwestern University under Melville Herskovitz, an anthropologist and student of Franz Boas. Dr. Reid also spoke to students about Edelweiss Park, the headquarters of Marcus Garvey's Edelweiss Amusement Company, which was used by Garvey to promote a variety of entertainment, including plays, poems, and religious services. Through these case studies, students explored how West Indian performers used their bodies to theorize freedom as a practice of self-ownership in response to the failures of the state's vision of post-coloniality.