Toshi Reagon

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, Urban Bush Women, Dorrance Dance, Nona Hendryx, Carl Hancock Rux, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Robert Wilson, and her band BIGLovely. Toshi co-composed music for two Peabody Award-winning films. 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. In 2011 she founded the Community festival Word*Rock*& Sword. Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon co-created the opera Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Ongoing projects include Long Water Song Marine Mammal Meditations w/ Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Octavia’s Parables w/ adrienne maree brown. In 2018 Toshi started the production company Wise Reagon Arts. Wise Reagon Arts presents Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower Spring/Summer 2023 and the work in progress disco based musical You’re Having Too Much Fun So We’re Gonna Have to Kill You. Toshi continues to tour as a solo artist and with her band Toshi Reagon and BIGLovely.

Photo by Flora Hanitijo.