TOSHI REAGON is a talented and versatile singer, composer, musician, curator and producer with a profound ear for sonic Americana—from folk to funk, from blues to rock. While her expansive career has landed her at Carnegie Hall, the Paris Opera House and Madison Square Garden, you can just as easily find Toshi turning out at a music festival, intimate venue or local club. She has collaborated with many artists including Carl Hancock Rux, Ani DiFranco, Lenny Kravitz, Elvis Costello and Nona Hendryx. As a composer, she has worked with Katori Hall, Urban Bush Women and The Jane Comfort Dance Co., among others. She is currently touring Bessie Award-winning The Blues Project with tap dancer Michelle Dorrance and Dorrance Dance. She founded WORD*ROCK*&SWORD, a community festival that takes place throughout New York City every September. Together with her mother Bernice Johnson Reagon, she has created two operas with director Robert Wilson, The Temptation of St. Anthony and Zinnias, The Life of Clementine Hunter. Toshi co-composed music for two Peabody Award-winning films and received a NYFA Award for Music Composition, the 2010 OutMusic Heritage Award and The Black Lily Music and Film Festival Award for Outstanding Performance. She is a National Women’s History Month honoree and was named a 2015 Art of Change Fellow by the Ford Foundation.
Upcoming Events
Watch Past Events
Viet Family Stories - Chuyện Gia Đình 2.0
Viet Family Stories, Chuyện Gia Đình 2.0 is an intergenerational multimedia storytelling project that brings together a group of Vietnamese American elder and young artists to co-create a series of monthly bilingual gatherings and dialogues grounded in Boston's Dorchester community. The project aims to explore and unpack themes of diaspora, resiliency, memories, mental health and healing practices in Vietnamese families. #VietFamStories
Climate Change, Survival, and Deepening Our Humanity
Toshi Reagon, Reverend Mariama White-Hammond, and Porsha Olayiwola discuss how the belief systems that define and maintain our societies impact the planet and influence our survival.
Call and Response: A Black Lives Matter Q&A for Young People
This forum is an opportunity to hear from young people their thoughts and feelings, to listen to their questions about where our community--our country--goes from here, and what their role is.
PARABLE PATH BOSTON CONVERSATIONS
On May 22nd, ArtsEmerson hosted a livestream presentation of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower where nearly 4500 people from all of the world joined us to listen to the powerful music of Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon, performed by a cast of amazing artists at the NYU Abu Dhabi production in 2015. This special evening marked the launch of Toshi’s Parable Path Boston, her year long artist residency at Emerson College.
