Carnegie Hall

Starr Busby (who accepts all pronouns said with respect) is a singing, writing, acting, and teaching artist committed to the liberation of all people. They may be seen playing solo shows or fronting the Brooklyn-based experimental soul band People’s Champs. Busby has also performed with the Gorillaz, Esperanza Spalding, X Ambassadors, Kimbra, and Alice Smith. Selected appearances include Moby Dick, Octet, Where Love Lies Fallow, Apollo Music Café: The Soul Cypher, #BlackGirlMagic Show, Mikrokosmos, and The Girl with the Incredible Feeling. They is an Ars Nova 2020–2021 Vision Resident and recently released their EP and accompanying film 9 Cups in the Moon available via her website. Busby also enjoys working as an arts educator at Carnegie Hall and Long Island University where they is a member of the voice faculty in musical theater.

Julia L. Gutiérrez-Rivera (“Julia Loíza”) was weaned as a child on bomba and plena as the youngest daughter of Juan Gutierrez, the founder and director of NYC’s vanguard bomba and plena ensemble Los Pleneros de la 21 (LP21). Since childhood, Ms. Gutiérrez-Rivera was taught by numerous bomba and plena luminaries. Over the years, she’s developed her own style combining both traditional influences and an urban swag, telling a story of complex diasporican identity and experience and pushing the envelope in traditional dance expression. She is now regarded as one of today’s most respected and premiere bomba and plena performers, dancers, educators, and advocates. As a performer and teaching artist, Julia has performed with Los Pleneros de la 21, Alma Moyo, Bámbula, Legacy Women, Plena Libre, Elio Villafranca, Papo Vázquez Pirate Troubadours, and more.

As program director and booking manager for Los Pleneros de la 21, Ms. Gutiérrez-Rivera revitalized the group’s artistic endeavors, community programming and touring. In 2017 she co-produced the group’s latest album, LP21: Live at Pregones, 35 Years of Bomba and Plena. Teaching professionally since 2003 with several ensembles and as an individual artist, she has engaged thousands of people from all walks of life and across the globe. Part of today’s next generation of Latinx cultural arts practitioners, she bridges her passion for dance, music, and culture with community and arts advocacy. She has worked in leadership development, organizational sustainability, youth enrichment, and community engagement with several cultural groups, arts institutions, and peer bomba and plena ensembles including De Almas, New York State Council on the Arts, Cultura Plenera, National Council for Traditional Arts, The Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and Carnegie Hall.

Martha Redbone is a vocalist, songwriter, composer, and educator who draws on both her Native American and African American musical heritage. Raised in Harlan County, Kentucky and pre-gentrified Brooklyn and armed with the power of her gospel-singing African American father and the resilience of her mother’s Cherokee/Shawnee/Choctaw culture, Redbone redefines Americana music. With songs and storytelling sharing her life experience as a Native American and Black woman and as a mother navigating the new millennium, she gives voice to issues of social justice by bridging traditions, connecting cultures, and celebrating the human spirit. She is the composer of the original music and score for The Public Theater’s 2019 revival For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf by the late Ntozake Shange. Her newest work is Black Mountain Women, a timely musical about the ongoing environmental destruction of her ancestral homeland in Appalachia as told through the lives of four generations of women.

Falu is a Grammy Award–nominated, internationally recognized artist who is known for her rare ability to blend a distinctly modern and inventive style with her formidable Indian Classical vocal training. Originally from Mumbai, she moved to the US in 2000 and was appointed as a visiting lecturer at Tufts University. Since then, she has collaborated with a range of outstanding artists, including Yo-Yo Ma, Wyclef Jean, Philip Glass, Ricky Martin, Blues Traveler, and A. R. Rahman, and has performed for President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. Her first album Falu was featured in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s exhibit Beyond Bollywood as a representative of the voice of an Indian American artist who transcends boundaries. In 2015, she was named one of the 20 most influential global Indian women by The Economic Times of India, and she won the Women Icons of India Award in 2018. Falu’s Grammy Award–nominated project Falu’s Bazaar takes families on a musical journey through South Asia. She performs with the band Falu & Karyshma, which is known for its ability to weave together the intensity of rock, the improvisation of jazz, and the intricacies of India’s deepest musical traditions. It released its most recent album, Someday, in 2020.

Guggenheim and USA Artists fellow; Doris Duke Artist Award winner; and multilingual vocalist, composer, instrumentalist, and dancer; Jen Shyu is, according to The Na'on, “one of the most creative vocalists in contemporary improvised music.” Born in Peoria, Illinois to Taiwanese and East Timorese immigrant parents and the first female and vocalist bandleader on Pi Recordings, she has produced eight albums, performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ms. Shyu is also a Fulbright Scholar who speaks 10 languages. Her Song of Silver Geese was among The New York Times’s Best Albums of 2017. She teaches via her Patreon, and she currently is touring her solo work Zero Grasses (commissioned by John Zorn) across all 50 states. Her latest album Zero Grasses: Ritual for the Losses has received rave reviews from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Grammy.com, and other publications. She is also a Paul Simon Music Fellows Guest Artist and a Steinway Artist, and co-founder with Sara Serpa of Mutual Mentorship for Musicians.

Layth Sidiq is an award-winning violinist, composer, educator, and the current artistic director of the New York Arabic Orchestra and the Center for Arabic Culture’s Youth Orchestra Program. He has toured the world and shared the stage with major artists such as Simon Shaheen, Danilo Perez, Javier Limon and Jack Dejohnette, as well as performing in prestigious venues like the London Jazz Festival, Boston Symphony Hall, WOMEX Expo, Panama Jazz Festival, and more. He is featured on multiple award-winning albums, and his first record Son of Tigris premiered at the Montreal Jazz Festival in 2016. In 2018, Mr. Sidiq won second place at the Seifert International Jazz Violin Competition as the first Arab to ever participate, and he was also recently named Best International Artist at the 2020 Boston Music Awards. He was the director of the Tufts Arab Music Ensemble for four years and is a current guest faculty member at Carnegie Hall’s Music Educators Workshop. He is in demand as a violinist, composer, and educator in the US and abroad.

Together as Soul Science Lab, Chen Lo and Asanté Amin specialize in performance, large-scale music and multimedia productions, and culturally responsive education. Working at the intersection of music, culture, and technology, the musical duo has developed and delivered numerous arts education workshops for students, educators, and intergenerational community audiences for the past seven years. Mr. Lo and Mr. Amin collaborated to produce and facilitate arts programs with premier arts institutions including Lincoln Center, Harlem Stage, SXSWedu, Classical Theater of Harlem, and others. The pair have been tapped to bring their unique approach to music and cultural arts education to a series of international organizations and conferences as well, including Music in Schools and Teacher Education Commission (MISTEC) in Dublin, Ireland, Dare to Dream Ghana, Create South Africa, and the International Hip Hop Symposium at Saõ Paulo University. Soul Science Lab has been featured in The Root’s Black History Month series and Vice’s “The Creators Project” for their poignant 360, I Can't Breathe. The duo also has a series of album projects, including Footprints, The Visitor: Alter Destiny, Plan for Paradise, a children’s music EP Soul Science Academy, and their live multimedia concert retrospective of the Black experience in America, Soundtrack ’63. They have performed in several concerts and festivals nationwide over the last seven years, including shows with the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans, Apollo Theater, Mass MoCA, Afropunk After Dark, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Sankofa.org's Many Rivers to Cross Festival, Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning and others. Most recently, the duo collaborated with Carnegie Hall to create a unique set of music education curriculums—based on the music and themes of their forthcoming visual album, Make a Joyful Noize—that challenge students to examine how artists respond to the world around them. The pair created a hip-hop songwriting, production and performance digital course series Page to the Stage that offers master classes with a culturally responsive curriculum, video tutorials, and resources to engage young learners in the world of hip hop.

Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa is a Zimbabwean gwenyambira (mbira player), scholar, composer, and singer whose creative practice centers African healing and self-liberation. Her music is grounded in the ancestral Chivanhu canon taught to her by the generations of svikiro (spirit mediums) and n’anga (healers) in her bloodline. Her internationally performed opera The Dawn of the Rooster tells of the stories of her family during the Second Chimuenga—Zimbabwe’s struggle for liberation from 1965 to 1980. She is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and she has held artistic residencies at National Sawdust and Castle of Our Skins.