Samora Pinderhughes

Samora Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist known for striking intimacy and carefully crafted, radically honest lyrics alongside high-level musicianship and cutting visuals. He is an extraordinary collaborator with an eye for the bigger picture and has worked with the likes of Robert Glasper, Karriem Riggins and Common under the August Greene moniker, as well as Burniss Travis, Christian Scott and his sister Elena Pinderhughes. He is also known for using his music to examine sociopolitical issues and works in the tradition of the black surrealists, those who bend word, sound, and image towards the causes of revolution.

Born and raised in the Bay Area, Pinderhughes began playing music at two years old and started piano at seven. His life changed forever when he was granted entry into the Young Musicians Choral Orchestra program, a free program for Bay Area youth, where he first studied harmony, learned about jazz, and began composing. He also studied music in Cuba for the time he and his family lived there in his youth. After graduating high school, Samora moved to New York to study at Juilliard under master teachers Kenny Barron and Kendall Briggs. It was also during this time that he met his primary artistic mentor, MacArthur-winning playwright Anna Deavere Smith.

This started Pinderhughes down the path of writing lyrics and combining film and theatre with his music in radical new ways. His first major political music project was „The Transformations Suite“, combining music, theatre, and poetry to examine the radical history of resistance within the communities of the African Diaspora and was followed by The Black Spring EP in 2020, as well as his critically acclaimed „GRIEF“ in 2022.