FOR MEDIA INQUIRIES
Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 503-5474
[email protected]
FOR MEDIA INQUIRIES
Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 503-5474
[email protected]
Collaborative Partner
Born in 1984 in Portland, Oregon, esperanza spalding (a.k.a. irma nejando) is an eaabibacliitoti* artist, trained and initiated in the North American (masculine) jazz lineage and tradition. Her work interweaves various combinations of instrumental music, improvisation, singing, composition, poetry, dance, therapeutic research, storytelling, teaching, regenerative agriculture, urban land and artist-sanctuary custodianship, and growing in love as a daughter, sister, cousin, niece, auntie, great-auntie, friend, while collaboratively decolonizing within and through her hometown community. She co-founded and serves as lead curator for Prismid Inc., a nonprofit that creates and stewards artist residency, performance, and workshop space in Portland, Oregon.
esperanza continues to collaborate and perform in new productions of …(Iphigenia), an opera written by Wayne Shorter, for which she wrote the libretto and co-produced its 2021–22 premieres // is currently developing a mockumentary in collaboration with brontë velez and the San Francisco Symphony // researching and developing liberation rituals in jazz and black dance // and through the Songwrights Apothecary Lab continuing a lifelong collaboration with practitioners in various fields relating to sound, healing, and cognition to develop music with enhanced therapeutic potential.
With her dance company Off Brand gOdds (co-founded with Antonio Brown) and the Songwrights Apothecary Lab she leads multi-week performance, teaching, workshop, and therapeutic-arts research residencies in collaboration with colleges and arts venues across the Americas, and throughout the world.
Her forthcoming installation “I love being Black/Quit saying I’m Black” opens in a near future, and is commissioned and produced by institutions who do the work themselves of learning about, reaching out to, and offering comprehensive support to eaabibacliitoti (and other ancestored) artists rather than demanding we take on the burden of proving our competency and worthiness to receive the resources required to deliver our medicine—uncontorted and well-rested—to our communities/the world.
*European-African ancestored, being influenced by American cultures living in Indigenous Territories of Turtle Island