Marc Bamuthi Joseph!

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH is a 2017  TED Global Fellow, an inaugural  recipient of the Guggenheim  Social Practice initiative, and an  honoree of the United States  Artists Rockefeller Fellowship.  Bamuthi’s opera libretto, We Shall  Not Be Moved, was named one  of 2017’s “Best Classical Music  Performances” by The New  York Times. His evening-length work created in collaboration with composer Daniel Bernard  Roumain, The Just and The Blind,  was commissioned by Carnegie  Hall and premiered to a sold out house at Carnegie in March 2019.  His upcoming opera Watch Night is inspired by the forgiveness exhibited by the congregation of  Emanuel AME church in Charleston,  and will premiere at The Perelman Center in New York in 2023.

While engaging in a deeply fulfilling and  successful artistic career, Bamuthi  also proudly serves as Vice  President and Artistic Director of Social Impact at the John F.  Kennedy Center for the Performing  Arts in Washington, DC. He is in high  demand for his creative approach  to organizational design, brand  development, and community  mediation, and has been enlisted  as a strategic partner or consultant  for companies ranging from Coca  Cola to Carnegie Hall. His TED  talk on linking sport to freedom  design among immigrant youth  has been viewed more than 1  million times, and is a testament  to his capacity to distill complex  systems into accessible and  poetic presentations. Bamuthi’s  community development philosophy, called “The Creative  Ecosystem”, has been implemented  in dozens of cities across the  United States and is the subject of  several critical writings, including  one of the seminal essays in  Cultural Transformations: Youth  and Pedagogies of Possibility,  published by Harvard Education  Press. Bamuthi is the founding  Program Director of the exemplary  non-profit Youth Speaks, and is  a co-founder of Life is Living, a  national series of one-day festivals  which activate under-resourced  parks and affirm peaceful urban  life. His essays have been published in Harvard Education  Press; he has lectured at more  than 200 colleges, and has carried  adjunct professorships at Stanford  and Lehigh, among others. A proud  alumnus of Morehouse College,  Bamuthi received an Honorary  Doctorate of Fine Arts from the  California College of Arts in the  Spring of 2022.