ABOUT

Brooklyn born and bred artist Tamar-kali (she/her) is a second-generation musician with roots in the coastal Sea Islands of South Carolina. As a composer and performer, Tamar-kali defies boundaries to craft her own unique sound and speak her lyrical truth with a supreme passion, voice and soulful intensity that will shake your foundation and shatter your expectations.

In 2017, her debut film score for Dee Rees’ Oscar-nominated “Mudbound” garnered her the World Soundtrack Academy’s 2018 Discovery of the Year Award. Her “expressive and varied score” (Variety) has been classified by Indiewire as one of the 25 Best Film Scores of the 21st Century. In June 2020, Tamar-kali’s score for Josephine Decker’s psychological drama SHIRLEY was named The Guardian’s Contemporary Album of the month. Tamar-kali’s various film scores have been featured at the Sundance Film Festival. 

Tamar-kali has been commissioned and presented nationwide by LA Opera, MOMA, Beth Morrison Projects, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Primavera Project, Catapult Opera, Harlem Stage and more. She is the co-curator and co-producer of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, a multi-day residency and orchestral concert event tracing the African American fight for freedom, supported by Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City Festival in July 2023. The concert features Sea Island Symphony: Red Rice, Cotton and Indigo, an orchestral love letter to her Gullah Geechee roots. In November 2023, her theatrical work Watch Night, conceived and directed by Bill T. Jones, and composed by Tamar-kali with a libretto by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, was premiered as part of Perelman Performing Arts Center’s inaugural season. More upcoming projects include Demon Fruit Blues, a dance and music concert exploring the origin of misogyny and ‘curse of womanhood’ through rock, gospel, blues and African rhythms; and Swann, an opera based on the life and times of William Dorsey Swann, a formerly enslaved person and America’s first documented drag queen, with libretto by Carl Hancock Rux.

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