Rhiannon Giddens

Musician Rhiannon Giddens has a lifelong mission to lift up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been erased, and to work toward a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins. She uses her art to excavate the past and reveal bold truths about our present.

Giddens co-founded the Grammy Award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, and she has been nominated for six additional Grammys for her work as a soloist and collaborator. She was most recently nominated for her collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, There is no Other. Giddens’s 2021 album, They’re Calling Me Home, is a twelve-track album, recorded with Turrisi in Ireland during the lockdown. She is also a member of the band Our Native Daughters with three other black female banjo players, Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell, and Amythyst Kiah, and co-produced their debut album Songs of Our Native Daughters, which tells stories of historic black womanhood and survival. She wrote the music for an original ballet, Lucy Negro Redux, for Nashville Ballet, and the libretto and music for an original opera, Omar, based on the autobiography of the enslaved man Omar Ibn Said for the Spoleto USA Festival. As an actor, Giddens had a featured role on the television series Nashville.

Named Artistic Director of Silkroad in 2020, Giddens is developing a number of new programs for the organization, including one inspired by the history of the American transcontinental railroad and the cultures and music of its builders.

Among her many diverse career highlights, Giddens has performed for the Obamas at the White House, served as a Carnegie Hall Perspectives curator, and received an inaugural Legacy of Americana Award from Nashville’s National Museum of African American History in partnership with the Americana Music Association. She is the 2023 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music.