Wendel Patrick is a professor, composer, producer, beatmaker, pianist, sonic architect, photographer, and videographer. He has been referred to as “David Foster Wallace reincarnated as a sound engineer” by Urbanite Magazine and as “wildly talented” by the Baltimore Sun. The alter-ego of classical and jazz pianist Kevin Gift, Wendel Patrick has made a name for himself internationally as a music producer of remarkable vision, skill, and talent. Equally at home performing on stage with his band, behind two turntables, beatboxing, improvising, or playing a Mozart concerto on stage with orchestra, Wendel Patrick has toured Europe on several occasions and performed throughout the world with renowned spoken word artist and poet Ursula Rucker. Wendel Patrick’s music has also been heard across the country on NPR stations, most notably on Out of the Blocks, the Edward R. Murrow Award–winning radio documentary program he coproduced with radio producer Aaron Henkin for NPR affiliate WYPR and PRX. Recent performances included a new collaboration between the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the Baltimore Boom Bap Society. An avid photographer and videographer, his photography has been exhibited in several art galleries including the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Ralph Arnold Gallery in Chicago.

Wendel Patrick / Kevin Gift majored in both music and political science at Emory University and earned his master’s degree in piano performance as a scholarship student at the Northwestern University School of Music in Evanston Illinois. He was a winner of the 2015 Baker Artist Awards’ Mary Sawyers Baker Grand Prize and was a member of the faculty at Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland from 2001 to 2013 teaching piano, introduction to music theory, music history, and electronic music production. He has taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art and at Loyola University Chicago where he was Department of Fine and Performing Arts guest artist-in-residence for 2019. In 2022, he was named Renaissance Man of the Year at the Baltimore Crown Awards. Recent engagements include a performance with The Philadelphia Orchestra for Darin Atwater’s “Black Metropolis” in July of 2023. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Music Engineering and Technology at The Peabody Music Conservatory where he teaches Hip-Hop Music Production: History and Practice, the first course of its kind to be taught at a major traditional music conservatory anywhere in the US. He is the host of Artworks on Maryland Public Television and was chosen as a Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow at the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute at Harvard University for 2021–2022. Currently Wendel Patrick is a visiting non-resident fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.