SAMMUS (Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo)

SAMMUS aka Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo—pronouns she/her—is a first-gen black feminist rapper, producer, and scholar with family roots in Côte D'Ivoire and the Congo. She was raised in Ithaca, NY, which is located on the traditional lands of the Cayuga Nation. Since 2010 Sammus has written, produced, and recorded three full-length albums, three EPs, a beat tape, and several one-off collaborations with notable artists including Moor Mother, Open Mike Eagle, Noga Erez,  Xenia Rubinos, Mega Ran, and Sadie Dupuis in addition to her collaborations with video game developers, podcasters, and filmmakers. In 2019 she received her PhD in science and technology studies from Cornell University and in 2022 she became the David S. Josephson Assistant Professor of Music at Brown University, located within the ancestral homelands of the Narragansett Indian Tribe.

Creatively, Sammus is interested in the aesthetics of anxiety, specifically what it means to be an anxious black girl. Whether her lyrics take the form of stream-of-consciousness style confessions, Afrofuturist fabulations, pro-weirdo anthems, or reflexive meditations on screen-mediated life, she remains poetically committed to granular introspection as a form of personal and cultural shadow work. Her live shows, characterized by her high energy and the inclusion of elements of cosplay, bring together a vibrant array of hip hop heads, punks, activists, and self-identified nerds and geeks, among others. As noted by the Los Angeles Times, Sammus “has a gift for getting a message across.”

Beyond her creative work, Enongo’s research interests include black feminist sound studies, ludomusicology, and hip hop praxis. Her doctoral research, which she completed in 2019, focuses on the sociotechnical dynamics that shape the development and use of “community-studios”—recording studios that provide high-quality recording tools, professional sound engineering services, and audio training to communities that often lack financial or social access to these resources.

Since Fall 2021 she has been a member of the steering committee for Brown’s science, technology, and society program. She is also serving as the Director of Audio at Glow Up Games, the first women-of-color led game studio, and she is a member of theKEEPERS, a Hip Hop collective that is currently developing the most comprehensive digital archive to map the international contributions of womxn and girls across Hip Hop’s 50-year history. In Fall 2022 she partnered with Dr. Charrise Barron to launch the Black Music Lab, a hub at Brown that centers the intellectual and creative exploration of musical forms such as hip-hop, black sacred musics, R&B, and house among other black musico-cultural traditions that remain underrepresented within academia despite their overwhelming sonic influence and popularity across the broader global soundscape.

Nadine Lee

Nadine Lee is an artist with more to her than meets the eye and has a deepness to her music which triggers emotional connectivity and honesty.

In a word Nadine Lee is ‘REAL’. Nadine is a drummer, bass player and singer/songwriter in that order and gives 100% to every performance no matter where it is. The range of artists & composers Nadine has worked alongside is a reflection of her professionalism within the music industry.

Theatre includes: The Lightning Child – Bass Guitar (Shakespeare’s Globe); Junkyard – Drummer (Bristol Old Vic/UK tour); This House – Drummer (Leeds Playhouse/UK tour); Peter Pan – Drummer (White City Theatre); Josephine – Composer/Musical Director (The Egg Theatre) Bagdad Cafe – Musical Director (The Old Vic Theatre), Wuthering Heights – Musical Director (National Theatre/UK TOUR), Othello – Musical Director/Arranger (The Watermill Theatre).

Film includes: The Man in The Hat (appeared as Nadine Lee, leader of the Nadine Lee Band)

Artists include: Lizzo, Stormzy, The London Philharmonic Orchestra, Annie Lennox, Stephen Warbeck, Wise Children, Headlong, Cece Winans, Ekklesia UK, London Community Gospel Choir, Lamar, Jamilia, Bryan McFaden, Katie Mueller and P Diddy. 

For Nadine music is not just a beat, rhythm or melody it’s the window to her soul, so you could say, the truth always comes out.

madison moore

madison moore (any pronouns) is an artist-scholar, DJ and Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. madison holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale and has previously held positions in the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California, Virginia Commonwealth University, The New School, the University of Richmond and King’s College London, and has also been a visiting guest artist in the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. He is broadly invested in the aesthetic, sonic and spatial strategies queer and trans people of color use to both survive and thrive in the five alarm fire of everyday life. His first book Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), offers a cultural analysis of fabulousness as a practice of resistance.

madison has also performed internationally at a broad range of art institutions and nightclubs, including The Kitchen, BASEMENT (NY), The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, SFMOMA, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Perth Festival, Performance Space Sydney, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, American Realness, Somerset House Studios London, Tate Britain, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and beyond. In 2022, madison held a nightlife residency at The Kitchen in New York in concert with the artist Sadie Barnette’s installation The New Eagle Creek Saloon, an ode to the first Black owned gay bar in San Francisco. As part of the six week Kitchen residency, madison curated a series of public programs with DJs, artists, scholars and queer nightlife performers intended to animate and amplify Barnette’s installation.

In February 2023, he guest co-edited a special issue of the arts journal e-flux on BLACK RAVE with McKenzie Wark. Currently, he is currently working on a second book project, HOW TO GET YOUR (NIGHT) LIFE (under contract, Yale University Press), focused on Black queer nightlife as a method of living.