MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH

A spoken word artist, librettist, speaker and thought leader making culture and designing equitable futures

Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a TED Global Fellow, an inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative, and an honoree of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. He is also the winner of the 2011 Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, and an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. In the Spring of 2022, he was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. An internationally renowned cultural strategist, Bamuthi is the co-creator of the paradigm-shifting allyship training HEALING FORWARD™. He has lectured in 25 different countries and his TED talk “You Have The Rite” has been viewed more than five million times.

Bamuthi has most recently completed commissions for Yale University, the Albany Symphony Orchestra, The Minnesota Orchestra, The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, and the Washington National Opera. His new opera "Watch Night" with music by Tamar-kali and direction by Bill T. Jones premiered at PAC NYC in 2023, and his collaboration with NYC Ballet Associate Artistic Director Wendy Whelan "Carnival of the Animals" will premiere and tour in 2024 and 2025.

An emergent onscreen talent, he is among the featured performers in HBO’s screen adaptation of “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehesi Coates. He currently serves as the Vice President of Social Impact and Artistic Director of Cultural Strategy at The Kennedy Center. A proud alumnus of Morehouse College, Bamuthi received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the California College of Arts in the Spring of 2022 and was the recipient of a second Honorary Doctorate from Middlebury College in the Spring of 2023.