Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa ('20-'21)
Professor Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa (she/her/hers) is a Zimbabwean gwenyambira, scholar, community organizer, composer, and singer whose storytelling serves to bridge Zimbabwe’s past and present, in order to inform a self-crafted future. Her craft lives at the intersection of music and healing, drawing from the generations of Svikiro (spirit mediums) and N’anga (healers) in her bloodline.
As a composer, her mastery of a plethora of instruments (voice, mbira, piano, Ngoma, hosho, and cello) creates a trans-continental narrative that embodies the hybridity of neocolonial Zimbabwe and its vast diaspora. Her call to composition is to harness the power of socially engaged truth-telling in order to give voice to her Zimbabwean immigrant/expatriate community; to create platforms to share the narratives of her community and to foster performance practices that regard the audience as a community participating in a shared ritual of collective healing through empathetic embodiment. Her musical works have been performed at Carnegie Hall, Princeton University, the Playroom Theatre (off-Broadway), Yale Repertory Theatre, and Soho Rep.
As a scholar, her work calls for an overhaul of the colonial archive in the performance and academic study of African music traditions, insisting on an African-authored archive as foundational epistemological texts. Her position stipulates a need to right the epistemicide (genocide of African knowledge systems) that took place as a result of the violent colonial encounter. Western academic institutions studying African cultural production are built on blood archives that continue to exploit cultural resources from the continent and this needs to be corrected. She recently published article “Cultural Vampires: White Exploitation of Zimbabwean Mbira Music” has led to the formation of the Gwenyambira Union — a Zimbabwean-led organization that protects guardians of Zimbabwe’s ancient musical traditions from ill-treatment and abuse by providing legal support for their cultural production and intellectual property.
As a community organizer, Professor Tawengwa is the co-founder of the Zimbabwean Artists Collective, a collective of US-based Zimbabwean artists with the mission of providing Zimbabwean-driven cultural content to the Zimbabwean community in the United States of America; the Zimbabwean Scholars Symposium, a community of Zimbabwean scholars proactively working to repopulate the Zimbabwean academic archive with African-authored epistemologies; Resident Alien Opera, a Philadelphia-based opera company dedicated to centering the narratives of the “Other”; the founder of Nhanha Inc. a company dedicated to creating children’s edutainment materials in Zimbabwean languages; the founder of the Mushandirapamwe Singers, a group of classically trained singers from the Pan-African Diaspora, singing the music of Southern African tradition and revolution; and a curator of discourse on the cultural economy for Zimbabwe’s Capital 100.4 FM radio station.
As a singer, Professor Tawengwa has toured globally and collaborated extensively. Notable collaborations include Zimbabwe’s legendary Katekwe star Oliver Mtukudzi, South African Jazz legend Bakithi Kumalo (known for his bassline in Graceland with Paul Simon), Hip-Hop Grammy Award-winning Ishmael Butler and his Shabazz Palaces, the American Spiritual Ensemble, Opera megastar Kathleen Battle, and Grammy Award-winning Ladysmith Black Mambazo. She was nominated as “Best Musical Artist” at the Zimbabwean Achievers Awards in 2018 and was awarded the Polaris Music Prize for her collaboration with Congolese-Canadian musician PIERRE KWENDERS.
Professor Tawengwa earned her B.A. in Music Composition (cum laude) from Princeton University, her M.M. in Voice Performance from the University of Kentucky and is currently completing her doctorate in Voice Performance from the University of Kentucky.
https://www.mushandirapamwe-singers.com/bio