Performance Year: 2026
Tamar-kali is a Brooklyn-born vocalist and award-winning composer with roots in the coastal Sea Islands of South Carolina. Whether with her alt-rock power quintet or her all femme chamber ensemble, she speaks her lyrical truth with a supreme passion and a voice that will shatter your expectations with its soulful intensity. Sonic Scoop has described her music as “an ambitious new adventure into metal, classical, and progressive styles.”
She has composed for Oscar-nominated and Emmy Award-winning films. Most recently, her original score for Rachel Morrison’s feature directorial debut The Fire Inside made the 2024 Oscars shortlist. In late 2023, Watch Night, a theatrical work conceived and directed by Bill T. Jones to a score by Tamar-kali and libretto by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, made its world premiere as part of the long awaited Perelman Performing Arts Center’s inaugural season. Her debut original score for Dee Rees’ Oscar-nominated Mudbound received the World Soundtrack Academy’s 2018 Discovery of the Year Award and was classified by Indiewire as one of the 25 Best Film Scores of the 21st Century. Additionally, the soundtrack for her score to Josephine Decker’s SHIRLEY was named The Guardian’s Contemporary Album of the month in June 2020.
Current projects include a full length chamber opera inspired by William Dorsey Swann, the first self-proclaimed “queen of drag,” and Sea Island Symphony: Red Rice, Cotton and Indigo, an orchestral love letter to her Gullah Geechee roots. “The genre-defying artist’s latest work for Lincoln Center, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, is a meditation on sovereignty, creating community, and the impact of Gullah Geechee traditions on American music.” (Harpers Bazar)
