Carnegie Hall

Samora Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist, vocalist, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist known for striking intimacy and carefully crafted, radically honest lyrics alongside high-level musicianship. He is also known for using his music to examine sociopolitical issues and fight for change. He works in the tradition of the Black surrealists—those who bend word, sound, and image towards the causes of revolution. Pinderhughes is a prison abolitionist and an advocate for process over product. His music is renowned for its emotionality, its honesty about difficult and vulnerable topics, and its careful details in word and sound. As an artist, Pinderhughes’s goal is that people will live differently after experiencing what he makes—that it will affect how they think, how they act, how they relate to others, how they consider their daily relationships to their country and their world.

Pinderhughes has collaborated with many artists across boundaries and scenes, including Herbie Hancock, Glenn Ligon, Sara Bareilles, Daveed Diggs, Titus Kaphar, and Lalah Hathaway. He works frequently with Common on compositions for music and film, and is featured as a composer, lyricist, vocalist, and pianist on the new albums August Greene and Let Love with Common, Robert Glasper, and Karriem Riggins. He has performed his compositions at Carnegie Hall, the Sundance Film Festival, and the Kennedy Center, and toured internationally with Branford Marsalis, Christian Scott, José James, and Emily King.

Born and raised in the Bay Area, Pinderhughes began playing music at the age of two and started piano lessons at seven. His life changed forever when he was granted entry into the Young Musicians Choral Orchestra—a free program for Bay Area youth—where he first studied harmony, learned about jazz, and began composing. While living in Cuba as a teenager, he developed a sense of artistic purpose and renewed its political direction through the writings of James Baldwin. After graduating from high school, Pinderhughes moved to New York City to study at The Juilliard School under master teachers Kenny Barron and Kendall Briggs. It was also during this time that he met his primary artistic mentor, Anna Deavere Smith.

This started Pinderhughes down the path of writing lyrics, and combining film and theater with his music in radical new ways. His first major political music project was The Transformations Suite, combining music, theater, and poetry to examine the radical history of resistance within the communities of the African diaspora, co-written with Christophe Abiel and Jeremie Harris. This was followed by the EP Black Spring in 2020, produced with Jack DeBoe; and the song, film, and interactive digital space Process. He is also the creator of The Healing Project, a massive multidisciplinary project that examines trauma and healing from incarceration, detention, and structural violence.

Pinderhughes’s GRIEF, an album of original songs and lyrics inspired by The Healing Project’s interviews, blooms from the same soil. The collection extends his forceful commitment to political transformation, and renders it through a beautiful interiority held by a chorus of voices. Featuring appearances by Immanuel Wilkins, Marcus Gilmore, Elena Pinderhughes, Nio Levon, Argus Quartet, and others, the album soars in its stunning harmonies, resonant vocals, and textured storytelling. As Pinderhughes explains, GRIEF invites the listener “to enter the most vulnerable parts of the self,” while never losing a sense of being accompanied. The album is an artistic witness to the times, in the tradition of Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield, and Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Pinderhughes is the first-ever Art for Justice + Soros Justice Fellow and a recipient of Chamber Music America’s 2020 Visionary Award. He has also been named a Creative Capital awardee, a Joe’s Pub / Public Theater artist-in-residence, and a Sundance Composers Lab fellow. He is a graduate of The Juilliard School and is currently pursuing a PhD at Harvard University in the Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry program under the direction of Vijay Iyer. Pinderhughes also scored the award-winning documentaries Going to Mars and Whose Streets?, and the Field of Vision film Concussion Protocol. The short film for Process, directed with Christian Padron, won 2021’s Best Experimental Film award at the BlackStar Film Festival. He is a member of Blackout for Human Rights, the arts and social justice collective founded by Ryan Coogler and Ava DuVernay, and was musical director for their #MLKNow and #JusticeForFlint events.