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), Intim...

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 rein...

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 Pri...

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 ...

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 wi...

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 wi...

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 Univers...

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 ...

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 pub...

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. Fu...

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 Wor...

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, wil...

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...

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 G...

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 re...