Fun Fact: esperanza spalding, a jazz bassist and singer, made history in 2011 by becoming the first jazz musician to win Best New Artist at the Grammy Awards, beating out Drake, Justin Bieber, and Florence & the Machine.

Born in 1984 in Portland, Oregon, esperanza spalding is an eaabibacliitoti* artist, trained and initiated in the North American (masculine) jazz lineage and tradition. Her work interweaves through various combinations of instrumental music, improvisation, singing, composition, poetry, dance, therapeutic research, storytelling, teaching, regenerative agriculture, urban land & 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 founded and serves as co-director of Prismid Sanctuary, a non-profit that creates and stewards free artist residency, performance, and workshop space in Portland, Oregon (Prismid.org).

With her dance project “Off Brand gOdds” and her therapeutic music incubator “Songwrights Apothecary Lab” she co-leads performance, teaching, workshop, and therapeutic-arts research residencies in collaboration with colleges and arts venues across the Americas and throughout the world. She is a 2024 recipient of the Doris Duke Foundation Artist Award and a 2016 Ford Foundation “Art of Change” Fellow.

*European-African ancestored being influenced by American cultures living in Indigenous Territories of Turtle Island