Here are the 12 extraordinary music artists nominated by music professionals for the 2020 Johnson Fellowship. 

Americans for the Arts applauds each of these artists for their significant contributions to making positive change in communities across the United States and to addressing issues facing communities, our country, and the planet, including:  equitable neighborhood development; creative youth development and civic engagement; cultural equity, identity and preservation; transgender awareness; Native American youth suicide; spiritual ecology; and violence, racism and police practices.

Eddy Kwon, Cincinnati, OH

Eddy Kwon is a composer-performer, violinist/violist, and community-based teaching artist living in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was one of two finalists for the Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. As a composer-performer, Eddy’s recent commissions include VIOLENCE, a performance work for electro-acoustic ensemble that explores structural violence in America.  His commitment to musical experimentation is equally matched with his commitment to community development through music. Eddy serves as Artistic Director of Price Hill Will, a non-profit comprehensive community development corporation serving the diverse neighborhood of Price Hill. As Artistic Director, Eddy leads Price Hill Will’s key arts programs: MYCincinnati, a tuition-free, daily youth orchestra program; the Price Hill Creative Community Festival that uses collaborative performing arts as a tool to build more creative and inclusive communities; the Creative Action Residency, a year-long artist residency with a goal of identifying, engaging with, and ultimately transforming oppressive systems through collaborative action. These programs are active at the intersection of creative youth development, community engagement, and equitable neighborhood development, and present a different model for how community development organizations can use the arts as a tool for advancing equity.  Eddy identifies as non-binary and accepts all gender pronouns.

Courtney Bryan, New Orleans, LA

Composer and pianist Courtney Bryan works in multiple genres, both sacred and secular, including jazz and other experimental music, traditional gospel, spirituals, and hymns. Unifying her compositions—solo to orchestral works, choral music and sound installations—is a desire to “communicate the sounds of rebellion and healing.” Improvisation is central to her music and she collaborates with dancers, visual artists, writers, and actors. Bryan's compositions explore human emotions through sound. Bryan’s music is also interwoven with the present, particularly in its commitment to confronting contemporary social injustices and commemorating the victims of racist police brutality in the United States. In 2016, she was commissioned by The Dream Unfinished: An Activist Orchestra to write a piece about Sandra Bland, called Yet Unheard and collaborated with the poet Sharan Strange and the vocalist Helga Davis. She has been an artist in residence with the Jacksonville Symphony, where she was commissioned to write a piece for the city and engaged with youth in schools to collect sounds and capture the essence of Jacksonville.

Dom Flemons, Silver Spring, MD

American songster Dom Flemons’ music covers nearly 100 years of American folklore, ballads, and tunes. A multi-instrumentalist and music historian, Dom is considered an expert player on the banjo, fife, guitar, harmonica, percussion, quills, and rhythm bones. For the past decade, he has been instrumental in the development of community outreach programs and awareness surrounding the African/Caribbean roots of the banjo, early American songsters, and expanding the documentation of popular roots music. In 2018, Flemons released his critically acclaimed album "Dom Flemons Presents Black Cowboys" on Smithsonian Folkways, which explores the complex history of the African American pioneers who helped build the United States of America in the 19th and 20th centuries. He has chosen to share these true stories by arranging traditional tunes and writing original songs, reciting poetry and re-creating tintype photographs along with a 40-page booklet. He has performed at correctional facilities, Boys and Girls clubs, and senior citizen housing communities. Flemons is committed to empowering, motivating and mentoring the next generation of roots artists. 

Venus Demars, Minneapolis, MN

Venus Demars is a musician and songwriter. For decades she has promoted and embodied transgender acceptance and human rights through performing and recording and audience engagement with her glam-metal band All the Pretty Horses. A 59-year-old Duluth native now living in Minneapolis, Venus came out as transgender at age 30.  Feeling the oppression as a kid, she “wanted to create through my art that it could be cool to be trans; it could be empowering to be who you feel you are.  That was the persona I tried to create.”  She is committed to engaging with and building understanding about being transgender among young people and broader audiences. As a respected part of the Minneapolis cultural community, five years ago Venus was invited to be part of Bare Bones Halloween Extravanganza, a community-created pageant of larger-than-life puppetry, drama, dance, fire, song, and music that honors the circle of life.  As musical director, she writes the musical score developed through community-based process and directs an entirely volunteer orchestra as part of the annual spectacle.  She is currently writing a memoir to further share her experiences as a transgendered woman and artist. 

Ashleigh Gordon, Boston MA

Ashleigh Gordon, violist, has performed throughout North America, Europe, and Hong Kong, ranging from chamber and orchestral music settings to off-Broadway and new music productions.  In community, as Artistic and Executive Director of Castle of Our Skins (COOS), COOS’s goal is to foster cultural curiosity and the idea of celebration about the music of Black composers and to counter media stigma and historical negativity centered around Blackness and Black culture. Ashleigh develops public programming as a way to educate, through music, other artistic disciplines, spoken word, and history. Ashleigh has co-designed/led educational workshops for over 1,000 youths in the Greater Boston area primary schools and community centers. In recognition of her advocacy of social and cultural awareness, she has been featured in the June 2015 International Musician Magazine; and awarded the St. Botolph Emerging Artist and Charles Walton Diversity Advocate award from the American Federation of Musicians.

Tiokasin Ghosthorse, New York

Tiokasin Ghosthorse is a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota (Sioux) Nation of South Dakota and an educator, musician and international speaker on peace and the global issues facing Native people. He plays the traditional Lakota cedar wood flute and combines insightful "spoken word" with the transcendence of the cedar flute. When he performs on his Lakota flute, he conveys to audiences the important aspects of the culture and traditional creation stories within the music. Tiokasin is most concerned with Native youth suicide and targets his workshops to locales where suicide attempts are devastatingly high. In recent years, he has been working with Lakota children in the capacity of promoting cultural values and music appreciation through his educational workshops. He hosts and produces First Voices Radio, a live weekly radio program of music and issues that he founded in 1993 and is now syndicated on 70 public and community radio stations. Tiokasin is a guest faculty member at Yale University’s School of Divinity, Ecology and Forestry and a Spiritual Ecology Youth Fellowship faculty member working with young ecology professionals.

Shaw Pong Liu, Boston, MA

Violinist and composer Shaw Pong Liu engages diverse communities through multidisciplinary collaborations, creative music and social dialogue. Her project Code Listen, uses songwriting and performances to support healing and dialogue around violence, racism, and police practices, in collaboration with the Boston Police Department, teen artists, family members surviving homicide and local musicians. Her ongoing project Sing Home, in Boston’s Chinatown, collects and shares songs of the people of Boston's Chinatown and creates new musical compositions as a way to start conversations about immigration, neighborhood, and cultural and civic identity. Previous projects include A Bird a Day, exploring birdsong, sunrises and composition (resulting in a site-specific composition for 18 solo string players in three tiers of balconies) and Soldiers’ Tales Untold, a musical-narrative production mixing veterans’ stories, live music, and audience dialogue about war. Shaw Pong is a founding member of Play for Justice, a network of musicians and artists in Boston supporting social justice causes. 

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, New Orleans, LA

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah is a trumpeter, composer, and producer. He is the progenitor of “Stretch Music,” a jazz-rooted, genre-blind musical form that attempts to “stretch” jazz’s rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic conventions to encompass as many other musical forms, languages and cultures as possible. In 2017, Christian released The Centennial Trilogy which speaks to issues that plague the collective human experience: slavery in America via the Prison Industrial Complex, xenophobia, immigration, climate change, gender inequality, fascism and the return of the demagogue. Christian is the grandson of legendary Big Chief, Donald Harrison Sr. and began “masking” with his grandfather in 1989.  He is dedicated to a number of causes that positively impact communities. He has worked with Guardians Institute in New Orleans’ 9th Ward, dedicated to reading and fiscal literacy and cultural retention, and committed to the participation of community elders and artists in uplifting and supporting youths in underserved areas of New Orleans.

Luke Stewart, Washington DC

Luke Stewart is a multi-instrumentalist, radio producer, writer, and event organizer.  His creative practice and collaborative choices intentionally elevate voices that need to be heard, often in spaces where they otherwise wouldn't. He connects musical communities that voice very different traditions and create spaces for musical dialogue and for building community power.  This has been especially true in terms of Washington DC's struggles with gentrification and displacement, both for artists and for DC's historic African American majority, as DC has lost many of its historic jazz spaces. Stewart has been an activist to ensure spaces where jazz and experimental musicians can converge.  He is cofounder of the nonprofit CapitalBop, Inc. dedicated to preserving, promoting and presenting jazz in Washington, D.C. and “building community around this music, because it’s important to the city’s historic identity, but also ever-changing and contemporary [identity].” He is Production Coordinator for WPFW 89.3FM, as well as the host of THE VIBES edition of Overnight Jazz, weekly eclectic jazz program.  There, he has worked with some seminal figures in music and social justice such as Chuck Brown, Yusef Lateef, and Amiri Baraka.

Rev. John Wilkins, Como, MS

Reverend John Wilkins is a gospel blues guitarist and vocalist and the son of the influential blues musician Reverend Robert Wilkins. Rev. Wilkins currently serves as the pastor for the Hunter’s Chapel Church in Como, Mississippi. Wilkins has infused his community with the music traditions of Northern Mississippi hill country blues, earning his chops playing at the jukes and country picnics, as well as in church.  Among other musicians, he has drawn noted folklorist Alan Lomax and other traditional music explorers to this place to hear and document the unique sound.  As a professional touring musician for decades, he has acted as ambassador for hill country music & culture across the globe. In Wilkins’s leadership role at Hunter’s Chapel, he kindly welcomes pilgrims from all over the world who seek a better understanding of a place so culturally significant in American music. In his own community, Wilkins uses his gospel and blues music to connect churchgoers to others and themselves and to the goodness in the world through hope, faith, and love. Hunter's Chapel Church has grown tremendously, especially the youth department, since Rev. Wilkins became pastor.  Rev. Wilkins aspires to open a Music and Arts Academy focusing on youth and music theory, vocal and instrumental teaching, dance, engineering and song writing.

Phil Woodmore, Saint Louis, MO

Phil Woodmore has been an active member of the St. Louis music community for many years. During his decade of work as a music educator and choir director in the Ferguson-Florissant School District, Phil promoted music and the arts as a vehicle for young people to develop into good citizens. He is the Coordinator of the Voice Program at the Center of Creative Arts (COCA) where he is the artist director of the Allegro Music Company, the Saint Louis Metropolitan Police Department Choir, minister of music at Trinity Community Church, vocal coach to many in St. Louis and New York and was recently named the director of the Saint Louis Community Gospel Choir. In 2016, after Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson, MO, Brian Doerries, Artistic Director of Theater of War, invited Phil to collaborate on a project in honor of Michael Brown for which he composed a musical score for Sophocles’ Antigone and put together a choir made up of individuals with varying views, backgrounds, and experiences. Antigone in Ferguson was performed in Ferguson and subsequently ran for 10-weeks at the St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn stimulating powerful dialogues with audiences from all walks of life about issues of police violence.

Hannibal Lokumbe, Bastrop, TX

Classic composer and jazz trumpeter Hannibal Lokumbe was selected as the Americans for the Arts 2020 Johnson Fellow for Artists Transforming Communities.  He has been celebrating and commemorating the African-American experience through music and words for over four decades. Lokumbe’s work has been commissioned and performed by symphonies and orchestras across the country, including The Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra (“Can you hear God Crying?” conducted by Dirk Brossé, 2012) including teen musicians, The Detroit Symphony Orchestra (“Dear Mrs. Parks,” conducted by Thomas Wilkins, 2005) and The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra (“God, Mississippi and a Man Called Evers” conducted by Dr. Leslie Dunner, 2002).Lokumbe is the founder and director of the Music Liberation Orchestra, a program that teaches music, genealogy and writing to incarcerated men around the country in institutions such as the Bastrop County Jail, located in Bastrop, Texas, Orleans Parish prison, located in New Orleans, La., and Holmesburg Prison located in Philadelphia, Pa. In 2014, Lokumbe completed “Trilogy Freedom Dance Cycle,” a narrative about the murders of three who were registering African-Americans to vote in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer Campaign in 1964.