Lineage Podcast

Lynn Nottage is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and a screenwriter. Her plays have been produced widely in the US and throughout the world. They include, Sweat (Pulitzer Prize, Obie Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), By The Way, Meet Vera Stark (Lilly Award, Drama Desk Nomination), Ruined (Pulitzer Prize, OBIE, Lucille Lortel, New York Drama Critics' Circle, Audelco, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Award), Intimate Apparel (American Theatre Critics and New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards for Best Play), Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine (OBIE Award), Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Las Meninas, Mud, River, Stone, Por'knockers and POOF!Nottage is the co-founder of the production company Market Road Films, whose most recent projects include Unfinished/Deep South (Podcast) and is developing the documentary Takeover, about the Young Lords takeover of Lincoln Hospital, as well as A Girl Stands at the Door, a multi-part series on the history of school desegregation.

Lynn Nottage is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and a screenwriter. Her plays have been produced widely in the US and throughout the world. They include, Sweat (Pulitzer Prize, Obie Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), By The Way, Meet Vera Stark (Lilly Award, Drama Desk Nomination), Ruined (Pulitzer Prize, OBIE, Lucille Lortel, New York Drama Critics' Circle, Audelco, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Award), Intimate Apparel (American Theatre Critics and New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards for Best Play), Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine (OBIE Award), Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Las Meninas, Mud, River, Stone, Por'knockers and POOF!Nottage is the co-founder of the production company Market Road Films, whose most recent projects include Unfinished/Deep South (Podcast) and is developing the documentary Takeover, about the Young Lords takeover of Lincoln Hospital, as well as A Girl Stands at the Door, a multi-part series on the history of school desegregation.

Camille A. Brown is a prolific Black female choreographer, who is reclaiming the cultural narratives of African American identity. Her bold work taps into both ancestral stories and contemporary culture to capture a range of deeply personal experiences. Ms. Brown is the first Black woman to serve as a director at the Metropolitan Opera, with their current production Fire Shut Up In My Bones. Shortly thereafter she's taking the reins of the Broadway revival of Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls.She has received numerous honors including a Guggenheim Award, Bessie Award, Jacob's Pillow Dance Award, a Doris Duke Artist Award, a Dance Magazine award, a United States Artists Award, 2 Audelco Awards, 5 Princess Grace Awards, and a New York City Center Award. She has received a Tony nomination, 3 Drama Desk, 3 Lortel nominations for her work in Theater. She is an Emerson Collective fellow, a TED fellow and the recipient of a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, among others. She is the 2021 Distinguished Artist, presented by The International Society for the Performing Arts. Other honors include the 2020 Dance Magazine Award recipient and 2020 Obie Award Winner for Sustained Excellence in Choreography.As Artistic Director of Camille A. Brown & Dancers (CABD), Ms. Brown strives to instill curiosity and reflection in diverse audiences through her emotionally raw and thought-provoking work. Her driving passion is to empower Black bodies to tell their story using their own language through movement and dialogue. Through the company, Ms. Brown provides outreach activities to students, young adults, and men and women across the country.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer. His latest collection of poems, Felon, won the 2020 American Book Award and NAACP Image Award. He is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer. His latest collection of poems, Felon, won the 2020 American Book Award and NAACP Image Award.  

Aimee Meredith Cox is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at Yale University. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of Anthropology, Black Studies, and Performance Studies. Cox's first monograph, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015), won the 2017 book award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America, a 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing, and Honorable Mention from the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize. She is also the editor of the volume, Gender: Space(MacMillan, 2018). Aimee is a dancer and choreographer. She performed and toured internationally with Ailey II and the Dance Theatre of Harlem and has choreographed performances as interventions in public and private space in Newark, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn. Her most recent work, based on interviews with long time activists in Cincinnati, engaged hundreds of residents in a performance ritual as part of her research in that city for an ethnography entitled Living Past Slow Death. An accomplished yogi who teaches master classes internationally, Aimee has led several yoga retreats and teacher trainings. Her experience in this realm is the basis for her next ethnographic exploration. This project considers the intersection of race, what she calls, ‘spiritual theater', and performances of healing and recovery within the context of rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn.

Fabiola Jean-Louis was born in Port Au Prince, Haiti on September 10th, 1978 and moved to Brooklyn, NY at a young age. While attending the High School of Fashion Industries, her passion for the arts flourished. She began taking self-portraits as a matter of convenience, shyness, and because she knew how to convey the stories she wanted to tell using her body. Later, her work grew to include other subjects, and costumes, as well as sculptures made entirely out of paper. Today, her practice is focused on experimentation through the use of different techniques, disciplines, and even art styles. Her love of Afro-futurism, science/ science fiction, pre and post industrial eras, elves, fairies, and history and folklore, are central themes in her work. Her current, and ongoing series, Rewriting History​, a three-part series consisting of period paper gowns, painterly photographs, and Polaroids opened as a solo exhibition at Smithsonian affiliates, DuSable Museum of African American History, Alan Avery Art Company, and Andrew Freedman Home to critical acclaim. It also earned her acceptance into the highly sought after residency at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD), New York City, and in September 2019, LUX Museum, San Diego. Fabiola was invited to join and participated in a BRIC Media group exhibition, Bordering the Imaginary: Art from the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and their Diasporas. Her works have been featured in the ​Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune, Modern Luxury, Artnet News, Art Critical, Hyperallergic, Atlanta Art Constitution, Chicago Sun Times, The Fashion Journal, The Haitian Times,​ and more.

Jazz pianist, composer, and artist Jason Moran was born in Houston, TX and earned a degree from the Manhattan School of Music. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010 and is the Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center. His 21 year relationship with his trio The Bandwagon (with drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen) has resulted in a profound discography for Blue Note Records and Yes Records, a label he co- owns with his wife, singer and composer Alicia Hall Moran. Alicia Hall Moran, mezzo-soprano, is a multi-dimensional artist performing and composing between the genres of Opera, Art, Theater, and Jazz.  Her solo albums, Heavy Blue and Here Today featuring the band Harriet Tubman, and live touring performances like Breaking Ice (shows for and about the ice since 2016), the motown project (her meditation on the operatic strains mixed with Motown begun in 2009); Black Wall Street (since 2016 ); and large-scale co-commissions with her husband Jason Moran. Jason and Alicia's long-standing collaborative practice is groundbreaking; as named artists in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, they together constructed BLEED, a five-day series of performances stretching from readings to wellness to a ring shouts.  In 2015, they participated in the Venice Biennnial curated by the late Okwui Enwezor. Recently they created Two Wings: The Music of Black America in Migration for Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium. They have collaborated with major art world figures such as Adrian Piper, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Adam Pendleton, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Xaveria Simmons, Bill T. Jones and Kara Walker.

Jazz pianist, composer, and artist Jason Moran was born in Houston, TX and earned a degree from the Manhattan School of Music. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010 and is the Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center. His 21 year relationship with his trio The Bandwagon (with drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen) has resulted in a profound discography for Blue Note Records and Yes Records, a label he co- owns with his wife, singer and composer Alicia Hall Moran. Alicia Hall Moran, mezzo-soprano, is a multi-dimensional artist performing and composing between the genres of Opera, Art, Theater, and Jazz.  Her solo albums, Heavy Blue and Here Today featuring the band Harriet Tubman, and live touring performances like Breaking Ice (shows for and about the ice since 2016), the motown project (her meditation on the operatic strains mixed with Motown begun in 2009); Black Wall Street (since 2016 ); and large-scale co-commissions with her husband Jason Moran. Jason and Alicia's long-standing collaborative practice is groundbreaking; as named artists in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, they together constructed BLEED, a five-day series of performances stretching from readings to wellness to a ring shouts.  In 2015, they participated in the Venice Biennnial curated by the late Okwui Enwezor. Recently they created Two Wings: The Music of Black America in Migration for Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium. They have collaborated with major art world figures such as Adrian Piper, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Adam Pendleton, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Xaveria Simmons, Bill T. Jones and Kara Walker.

Jazz pianist, composer, and artist Jason Moran was born in Houston, TX and earned a degree from the Manhattan School of Music. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010 and is the Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center. His 21 year relationship with his trio The Bandwagon (with drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen) has resulted in a profound discography for Blue Note Records and Yes Records, a label he co- owns with his wife, singer and composer Alicia Hall Moran. Alicia Hall Moran, mezzo-soprano, is a multi-dimensional artist performing and composing between the genres of Opera, Art, Theater, and Jazz.  Her solo albums, Heavy Blue and Here Today featuring the band Harriet Tubman, and live touring performances like Breaking Ice (shows for and about the ice since 2016), the motown project (her meditation on the operatic strains mixed with Motown begun in 2009); Black Wall Street (since 2016 ); and large-scale co-commissions with her husband Jason Moran. Jason and Alicia's long-standing collaborative practice is groundbreaking; as named artists in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, they together constructed BLEED, a five-day series of performances stretching from readings to wellness to a ring shouts.  In 2015, they participated in the Venice Biennnial curated by the late Okwui Enwezor. Recently they created Two Wings: The Music of Black America in Migration for Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium. They have collaborated with major art world figures such as Adrian Piper, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Adam Pendleton, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Xaveria Simmons, Bill T. Jones and Kara Walker.    

Jazz pianist, composer, and artist Jason Moran was born in Houston, TX and earned a degree from the Manhattan School of Music. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010 and is the Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center. His 21 year relationship with his trio The Bandwagon (with drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen) has resulted in a profound discography for Blue Note Records and Yes Records, a label he co- owns with his wife, singer and composer Alicia Hall Moran.Alicia Hall Moran, mezzo-soprano, is a multi-dimensional artist performing and composing between the genres of Opera, Art, Theater, and Jazz. Her solo albums, Heavy Blue and Here Today featuring the band Harriet Tubman, and live touring performances like Breaking Ice (shows for and about the ice since 2016), the motown project (her meditation on the operatic strains mixed with Motown begun in 2009); Black Wall Street (since 2016 ); and large-scale co-commissions with her husband Jason Moran.Jason and Alicia's long-standing collaborative practice is groundbreaking; as named artists in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, they together constructed BLEED, a five-day series of performances stretching from readings to wellness to a ring shouts. In 2015, they participated in the Venice Biennnial curated by the late Okwui Enwezor. Recently they created Two Wings: The Music of Black America in Migration for Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium. They have collaborated with major art world figures such as Adrian Piper, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Adam Pendleton, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Xaveria Simmons, Bill T. Jones and Kara Walker.

Dr. Fahamu Pecou is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose works combine observations on hip-hop, fine art and popular culture. Pecou’s paintings, performance art, and academic work addresses concerns around contemporary representations of Black men and how these images impact both the reading and performance of Black masculinity. Fahamu received his BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1997 and a Ph.D. from Emory University in 2018. Dr. Pecou exhibits his art worldwide in addition to lectures and speaking engagements at colleges and universities. Dr. Pecou has also developed (ad)Vantage Point, a narrative-based arts curriculum focused on Black male youth and he is the founding Director of the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (ADAMA).

Firelei Báez ​(b. 1981, Dominican Republic) ​is a celebrated painter and sculptor who received a M.F.A. from Hunter College, a B.F.A. from the Cooper Union’s School of Art, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2020, Báez was shortlisted for Artes Mundi 9, and will be the subject of a solo presentation at the ICA Watershed, Boston, MA this summer. Just this week, it was announced that she is the recipient of the 2021 Phillip Guston Rome Prize-- a highly competitive fellowship that supports advanced independent work and research in the arts and humanities. Baez has had solo exhibitions at the Mennello Museum of Art, Orlando, FL, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the Modern Window at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her major 2015 solo exhibition Bloodlines was organized by the Pérez Art Museum Miami and travelled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

An award-winning and leading poet, publisher & an architect of the Black Arts Movement, Prof. Haki R. Madhubuti has published 30+ books (some under his former name, Don L. Lee) and is one of the world’s best-selling authors of poetry and non-fiction. His book, Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? The African American Family in Transition, has more than one million copies in print and his poetry and essays have been published in more than 100 anthologies and journals.    

Marc Bamuthi Joseph currently serves as the Vice President and Artistic Director of Social Impact at The Kennedy Center. He co-founded the Life is Living Festival for Youth Speaks, and created the installation “Black Joy in the Hour of Chaos” for Creative Time. His opera libretto, We Shall Not Be Moved, was named one of 2017’s “Best Classical Music Performances” by The New York Times, and his work /peh-LO-tah/ toured nationally. Future projects include commissions for the Perelman Center, Washington National Opera, and others, and a feature in HBO’s upcoming adaptation of “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehesi Coates. An inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative, Bamuthi also previously worked as the Chief of Program and Pedagogy at YBCA in San Francisco.

Kamilah Forbes is an award-winning director and producer for theater and television. She currently serves as the Executive Producer at the World-Famous Apollo Theater in Harlem. Her directing credits include “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark,” written by Lynn Nottage, “Blood Quilt” by Katori Hall, and “Sunset Baby” by Dominique Morrisseau. Her most recent directorial work, an adaptation of Ta-nehisi Coates’ seminal work “Between the World and Me,” aired as a special event on HBO  to critical acclaim.

Announcing the new season of the Lineage Podcast + Portrait Project! Lineage features intimate, in-depth interviews with contemporary socially engaged Black artists. Season Two will include conversations with renowned creatives and thought leaders Firelei Báez, R. Dwayne Betts, Camille A. Brown, Aimee Meredith Cox, Kamilah Forbes, Shani Jamila, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Kiese Laymon, Fabiola Jean Louis, Haki Madhubuti, Alicia Hall Moran, Jason Moran, Lynn Nottage, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Wendi Moore-O’Neal, Fahamu Pecou, Sonia Sanchez and Carrie Mae Weems. Stay tuned for bi-weekly audio interviews with each of the featured guests, beginning on Tuesday March 2nd. Subscribe to receive new episodes every other Tuesday.

Season Two of the Lineage podcast launches with master storyteller and poet Sonia Sanchez! In addition to being a founder of the National Black Arts Movement and the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University, where she held the Laura Carnell Chair in English, Sonia is an award-winning writer of sixteen books, including  Morning Haiku, Wounded in the House of a Friend, and Shake Loose My Skin. A new volume, Collected Poems, will be released by Beacon Press this spring.

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is the founding artistic director and chief visioning partner of Urban Bush Women, a performance ensemble dedicated to exploring the use of cultural expression as a catalyst for social change. Designated a Master of Choreography by the John F. Kennedy Performing Arts Center, she received the Bessies Lifetime Achievement Award and honorary degrees from both Tufts University and Rutgers University.

Steffani Jemison is a celebrated visual artist whose work is in the public collections of the Whitney Museum (where she was featured in the 2019 Biennial), Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of Modern Art, amongst others. She holds an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Columbia University.  A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, she currently serves as an Assistant Professor in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

Pulitzer Prize winning poet Tyehimba Jess is the author of leadbelly and Olio. A Cave Canem and NYU alumni, Jess is a Professor of English at the College of Staten Island.

Pulitzer Prize winning poet Tyehimba Jess is the author of leadbelly and Olio. A Cave Canem and NYU alumni, Jess is a Professor of English at the College of Staten Island. This is the first of our two part conversation.

On this bonus episode, Lineage host Shani Jamila is the guest and the mic is in the capable hands of Jodine Dorce, who’s one of those rare, amazing people who’s a powerhouse both onstage and behind the scenes. She is the the host of the world-renowned Apollo Theater’s Music Cafe, she recently launched a new quarantine web series called The Silver Lining, and she produced an entire ESSENCE Festival. This episode was recorded live at the Ace Hotel, where Shani was a 2019 Artist in Residence.

Jerome Lagarrigue is a New York based painter who was raised in Paris. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, he is featured in two documentary films, Heavyweight Paint and Jerome Lagarrigue: Portrait of an Artist. His work has been supported by residencies including Villa Medici in Rome. Jerome is represented by Galerie Olivier Waltman (Paris/Miami) and Dolby Chadwick gallery in San Francisco.

This episode of Lineage was recorded live at the Brooklyn Museum to commemorate the close of the seminal Soul of A Nation exhibition. Host Shani Jamila spoke with Ming Smith, a legendary photographer whose work was featured in the show, and Russell Frederick, an acclaimed documentary photographer known for his portraits of Bed Stuy. Both of them are members of Kamoinge, an intergenerational collective of Black photographers. We talk about what brought them to their work, the goals of their practice and the rich tradition of image makers that inspire them.

Otto Neals is a painter, sculptor and printmaker who was born in South Carolina in 1930. Neals has been a member of the Weusi Artist Collective since the 1960s. His  work can be found in collections including the Smithsonian, Howard University, The Studio Museum, Ghana National Museum, Columbia Museum, & the private collections of Congressman John Lewis, Harry Belafonte and Oprah Winfrey.

Okwui Okpokwasili received a B.A. (1996) from Yale University. Her performance work has been commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Danspace Project, Performance Space New York, the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, the 10th Annual Berlin Biennale, and Jacob’s Pillow, among other institutions. She has held residencies at the Maggie Allesee National Choreographic Center, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Rauschenberg Foundation Captiva Residency, and New York Live Arts, where she was a Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist. She is a MacArthur Genius Fellow and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts.

Derrick Adams is a Baltimore-born, Brooklyn, New York-based artist whose critically admired work spans painting, collage, sculpture, performance, video, and sound installations.  Adams received his MFA from Columbia University and BFA from Pratt Institute. He is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation’s Studio Program.  His work resides in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Birmingham Museum of Art.

Rashida is an accomplished performance artist, choreographer and curator. A United States Artists awardee, Bumbray is one of the inaugural social practice artists in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Director of Culture and Art at the Open Society Foundation.  

Adepero is an actress, director and writer. She is known for her leading role in Pariah (2011), as well as supporting roles in 12 Years A Slave (2013), The Big Short (2015) and When They See Us (2019). Her theatre credits include Danai Gurira's play Eclipsed; Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye; and Fela!, directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones.  

Stay tuned for Season One of Shani Jamila’s new podcast Lineage, which will feature live shows and in-depth interviews about the idea of home with some of New York City’s most imaginative thinkers– including MacArthur geniuses, Pulitzer Prize winners and Bessie Award recipients. Check out the trailer for a sneak peek into what’s to come!