Marc Bamuthi Joseph

Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a 2017 TED Global Fellow, an inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative, and an honoree of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. His opera libretto, We Shall Not Be Moved, was named one of 2017’s “Best Classical Music Performances” by the New York Times. His evening-length work created in collaboration with composer Daniel Bernard Roumain, The Just and The Blind, was commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered to a sold-out house at Carnegie in March 2019, and his upcoming opera Watch Night will premiere at The Perelman Center in New York in 2023. Bamuthi is Vice President and Artistic Director of Social Impact at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. His community development philosophy, “The Creative Ecosystem,” has been implemented in dozens of cities across the United States and is the subject of several critical writings, including one of the seminal essays in “Cultural Transformations: Youth and Pedagogies of Possibility,” published by Harvard Education Press.