Kamara Thomas

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Kamara Thomas is a singer, songspeller, multidisciplinary storyteller and mythological excavator based in Durham, North Carolina. As a 2022-24 Princeton Arts Fellow she has taught songwriting and multidisciplinary storytelling, and over the 2023-24 academic year she will be developing and presenting her storyworks Tularosa: An American Dreamtime and Xulgaria.

Kamara's work is collaborative and multi-faceted– weaving together musical and theater performance, film-making, ritual, and visual elements including masks, nature-works, sculpture, archival material and photography. She leads communal art-making processes that result in site-specific, immersive storytelling environments and activations for public spaces, galleries and stages.

Tularosa: An American Dreamtime is an ongoing collaboration with Boulder, Colorado-based theater company Band of Toughs. Based on Kamara’s 2022 eponymous album and song-cycle, the storywork interrogates the mythology of the American West as it seeks to reinvent and heal the American mythologies that underpin our collective cultural identity. A forthcoming final work will be the integration point of a series of multidisciplinary experiments including #9 - a pandemic performance for nine social-distancers (2020), the videos Good Luck America (2018) and Oh Gallows (2016), Soapbox (2018), a community-based agitprop performance that traveled throughout public spaces in downtown Durham, and recent performances (2022) which activated the campus of the Sante Fe Art Institute.

Xulgaria is a dark yet playful musical storywork based on another of Kamara’s song-cycles, geared toward young womxn and gender non-conforming folks, which responds to the “epidemic of loneliness.” Through an emergent community art-making process, personal storytelling, and body contact with Nature, Kamara will be leading multidisciplinary play in spring 2023 to explore and mirror global stories of the underworld (specifically Isis, Innana and Persephone), and devising a performance at Princeton (and eventually, a film) presenting powerful, personal symbols and communal rituals that discuss issues around mental health and healing.

Kamara has been the recipient of grants from MAP Fund, Whippoorwill Arts, Arnold Shultz Fund, Durham Arts Council and North Carolina Arts Council. She has commissioned work for Santa Fe Art Institute, No Depression, Duke University, University of North Carolina and Cassilhaus, leads various music groups, and directs music videos on a regular basis. She also spearheads Country Soul Songbook, an artist-driven and -focused media platform and production team rooted in the mission to amplify historically marginalized voices (BIPOC/LGBTQIA+) in Country, Americana and American roots music.

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated.

TULAROSA: An American Dreamtime (2022), album by Kamara Thomas. Listen and purchase on Bandcamp