Biography
Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) is a national and international touring musician, poet, visual artist, and Professor of Composition at the USC Thornton School of Music. Her work speaks to many genres from electronic to free jazz and classical music. Camae's work has been featured at the Guggenheim Museum, The Met, Carnegie Mellon and Carnegie Hall, Documenta 15, the Berlin Jazz Festival, and the Glastonbury Festival. Through the lens and practice of her art, she leaves a statement for the future, as well as a way to honor the present and its historic connections to a multitude of past realities and future outcomes. She specializes in practical concepts, but works in speculation and historical concepts.
The solo outlet for Moor Mother's music combines social issues with a visceral blend of hardcore electronics and her intense poetry, taking influence from punk, hip-hop, jazz, soul, and numerous other genres. Also an educator, coach, and social activist, Ayewa is a co-founder of the Black Quantum Futurism artistic and literary collective, a member of the avant-jazz group Irreversible Entanglements, and one-half of the experimental club duo 700 Bliss. First making an impact with 2016's Fetish Bones, her work grew more experimental and politically outspoken with each new chapter, using charged spoken word lyrics and furious free jazz instrumentation on her 2020 album Circuit City. 2021's Black Encyclopedia of the Air was more atmospheric than her previous work but just as confrontational and thought-provoking. On 2024's The Great Bailout, she concentrated on the history and lasting effects of British colonialism.
Moor Mother creates soundscapes using field sounds and archival sound collage in order to create sonic maps that allow us to journey to our buried histories and futures. She is an artist who, through writing, music, film, visual art, socially engaged art, and creative research, explores personal, cultural, familial, and communal cycles of experience, and solutions for transforming oppressive linear temporalities into empowering, alternative temporalities. Her work seeks to inspire practical techniques of vision and agency against a forever expanding re -conquering of land, housing, and health in Black communities. Camae is a Pew Fellow, a The Kitchen Inaugural Emerging Artist Awardee, a Leeway Transformation Award, a Blade of Grass Fellow as part of Black Quantum Futurism, and a Rad Girls Philly Artist of the Year. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at West Philadelphia Neighborhood Time Exchange, WORM! Rotterdam residency, and the Creative Capital and CERN collide residency with Black Quantum Futurism.
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