Toshi Reagon

EcoTones is the culmination of Toshi Reagon’s Southern Futures residency and nearly a decade of creative partnership with Carolina Performing Arts. Over those years, Toshi has brought artists, researchers, students, and community members into conversation with one another, building relationships that extend far beyond any single performance.

This project reflects the way she works. Toshi has long challenged assumptions about whose voices belong at the center of cultural conversations. In EcoTones, researchers are not sources or advisors working behind the scenes—they are collaborators, storytellers, and co-creators whose ideas take their place on stage alongside music and performance.

As a commissioned world premiere, EcoTones could only have been made through years of trust, curiosity, and collaboration. It reflects a belief shared by Toshi and Carolina Performing Arts: that some of the most meaningful discoveries happen when artists, scholars, and communities come together to ask questions that none of them could answer alone.

Toshi Reagon is a multi-talented and versatile singer, composer, musician, curator, and producer with a profound ear for sonic Americana. Her expansive career includes residences at Carnegie Hall, the Paris Opera House, and multiple festivals and venues nationally and internationally. A highly collaborative artist, she has worked with many musicians, choreographers, film, and theater makers, including Meshell Ndegeocello, Rhiannon Giddens, Dorrance Dance, Nona Hendryx, Carl Hancock Rux. She is a 2015 Art of Change Fellow by the Ford Foundation. A 2018 United States Artist Fellow, and an Andrew W. Melon Creative Futures Fellow Carolina Performing Arts. In 2021, Toshi received the APAP Award for Merit in the Performing Arts and was a 2021 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Music. Toshi received an honorary doctorate from Emerson College in 2022.

Toshi and her mother Bernice Johnson Reagon collaborated on many projects including composing music for ctwo Peabody Award-winning films. They composed and co- created the opera Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower. They wrote the libretto and score for the operas The Temptation of St. Anthony and Zinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter both directed by Robert Wilson.

Ongoing projects include LongWaterSong Marine Mammal Meditations w/ Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Octavia’s Parables Podcast with adrienne maree brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Songs of the Living Community Choirs, and multiple collaborations, and curated events nationally and internationally. Toshi created the production company Wise Reagon Arts in 2018. New works include the musical You’re Having Too Much Fun So We’re Gonna Have to Kill You and the new collaborative work EcoTones- A Memory Project. She continues to tour solo and with her band BIGLovely. Her music can be found on Bandcamp and Apple Music.wisereagonarts.com

To learn more about Toshi Reagon, click here.

Collaborators:

• Danielle Purifoy
• Daneille Spurlock
• Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Watch: ONE ON ONE: Toshi Reagon