Maya Cunningham is an ethnomusicologist, a jazz vocalist, and a cultural activist. Her research focus is on African American cultural identity and traditional African and African American musics. She is an expert in African American expressive culture, African American history, and jazz history. She is a jazz vocalist in the tradition of Abbey Lincoln, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, and Lorez Alexandria. She is also as a composer and conceptual artist who fuses her music with visual arts works in textile, glass, paint and mixed media. She sings in several African languages, including Ewe, Bamana, and Setswana.
Maya Cunningham is an Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is completing a PhD in African American studies with a concentration in ethnomusicology at the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has earned three masters of arts, one of which is in Afro-American Studies from UMass Amherst, another in ethnomusicology from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a third in jazz performance from the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College. She received a Bachelor of Music in jazz studies from Howard University. Cunningham recently received the 2022 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. Cunningham is also a 2017 Fulbright Fellow and has presented her research and writing at conferences nationally and internationally.
In 2022 Cunningham published, “The Hush Harbor as Sanctuary: African American Survival Silence During British/American Slavery,” in Sonic Histories of Occupation: Sound and Imperialism in Global Context (Taylor and Skelchy, eds: Bloomsbury, 2022). Another book chapter, “Singing Power/Sounding Identity: The Black Woman’s Voice from Hush Harbors and Beyond” is included in The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories, edited by Janell Hobson (2021). Cunningham has also published public-facing work, like a curated playlist and accompanying essay “A People In Flight: African Americans in Movement” for Smithsonian Folkways Records, and “The Sound World of Harriet Tubman” in Ms. Magazine (March 2022).
In 2017 Cunningham launched Ethnomusicology In Action, a project of Themba Arts and Culture, Inc. to empower Afro-descendant children through research-based Black Music curricula that offers them robust learning opportunities about their history, culture, and traditional music. Ethnomusicology In Action also aims to contribute to the public narrative on Black music traditions through recordings and broadcast media. Learn more at www.EthnomusicologyInAction.org