Sunday, January 26, 2025 | 4:00 PM
Martinos Auditorium, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts
Free and open to the public

Pre-screening Conversation with Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad

A Netflix Documentary
With Mercury Studios
In Association with Higher Ground Productions
An Hour Time Projects Production
A Film by Matthew Heineman

It’s 2022 and musician Jon Batiste is at the peak of his music career while also embarking on his most ambitious challenge - composing an original symphony. In the midst of this meteoric rise, Batiste’s wife - best-selling author Suleika Jaouad - learns that her long-dormant cancer has returned. AMERICAN SYMPHONY is an intimate portrait of two artists and the healing power of love and creativity.

Jon Batiste

Jon Batiste is a five-time Grammy Award-winning and Academy Award-winning singer, songwriter and composer. 

Batiste released his eighth studio album, Beethoven Blues (Batiste Piano Series, Vol. 1), in November 2024 via Verve Records / Interscope. Marking the first installment in his new solo piano series, the project showcases Batiste’s interpolations of some of Beethoven’s most iconic works, reimagined through an expansive lens. These reimagined classics embody the indomitable spirit of the blues, and – true to Batiste’s “message of open-armed inclusivity” (New York Times) – embrace a broad genre spectrum. 

Beethoven Blues (Batiste Piano Series, Vol. 1) follows World Music Radio (released August 2023 via Verve), which draws inspiration from Batiste’s mission to create community and expand culture with the power of music. Featuring collaborators including Jon Bellion, Lana Del Rey, Lil’ Wayne and more — the album received positive reviews from critics who praised the project for its universal message and genre-defying sound. Hailed by NPR as “a sprawling exploration of what global music can sound like,” the album received a total of five Grammy nominations, including ‘Album of the Year.’ Batiste kicked off his first-ever headlining tour, ‘Uneasy Tour: Purifying the Airwaves for the People,’ the following year. 

Batiste’s innovative score is featured in Jason Reitman’s SATURDAY NIGHT, which released in theaters in October 2024. Depicting the chaotic 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live in 1975, the film is underscored by Batiste’s musical masterpiece, which features a blend of jazz, classical, and contemporary elements. Batiste composed and produced the music live on the soundstage in front of the cast and crew, perfectly capturing the intensity and unpredictability of the show’s debut episode.  

Batiste was the subject of Matthew Heineman’s moving 2023 documentary AMERICAN SYMPHONY, released on Netflix in partnership with Barack Obama and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground. Batiste and Grammy winner Dan Wilson penned the emotional song “It Never Went Away,” for the film, which earned an Oscar nomination for “Best Original Song” and two Grammy nominations.  

In 2021, Batiste released We Are, which was nominated for 11 Grammys Awards across seven different categories, a first in Grammy history. He went on to win five Grammys Awards that evening, including “Album of the Year.” In 2018, he received a Grammy nomination for Best American Roots, and in 2020, he received two Grammy nods for the albums: CHRONOLOGY OF A DREAM: LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD and MEDITATIONS (with Cory Wong). Batiste also composed and performed music for the Disney/Pixar film SOUL, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Score alongside fellow composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. SOUL also earned Batiste a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, a NAACP Image Award and a Critic’s Choice Award. From 2015 until 2022, Batiste served as the bandleader and musical director of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS.  

Suleika Jaouad

Suleika Jaouad (pronounced Su-lake-uh Ja-wad) is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, author, artist, and advocate. She documented her odyssey of illness, healing, and self-discovery in the instant New York Times bestselling memoir Between Two Kingdoms, which has been translated into over twenty languages. After a leukemia diagnosis cut short Jaouad’s career aspirations as a foreign correspondent, at age 22, she began writing her widely read New York Times column and video series “Life, Interrupted” from the front lines of her hospital bed. Since then, she has become an inspiring guide for those living with illness and navigating life’s many interruptions. 

Jaouad is also the creator of the Isolation Journals, a weekly newsletter that was founded at the beginning of the pandemic to help people transform life’s interruptions into creative grist and community; it has over 170,000 subscribers from 200 countries around the world and is one of the most popular publications on Substack. She began painting at age 33, when medication to treat a leukemia relapse temporarily impaired her vision, making writing a challenge. Her first art exhibit is forthcoming at ArtYard in June 2024. Along with her husband, the musician Jon Batiste, she is the subject of the Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary, American Symphony, which is a portrait of two artists during a year of extreme highs and lows and a meditation on art, love, and the creative process. Her essays and reporting have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Vogue, among others.

Born in New York City to a Tunisian father and a Swiss mother, Jaouad attended The Juilliard School's pre-college program for the double bass. She earned her BA in Near Eastern studies with highest honors from Princeton University and an MFA in writing and literature from Bennington College.

A vocal advocate for prison and healthcare reform, Jaouad has served on Barack Obama’s Presidential Cancer Panel and was the recipient of the inaugural Inspire Award from NMDP (formerly Be the Match) for her work to expand and diversify the national bone marrow registry.

To receive her free weekly newsletter, subscribe here. To learn more about becoming a bone marrow donor, join the symphony.