Naomi André is the David G. Frey Distinguished Professor in the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Michigan in Afroamerican and African Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Residential College. Her degrees are from Barnard College (BA) and Harvard University (MA, PhD). Her research focuses on opera and issues surrounding gender, voice, and race in the US, Europe, and South Africa. Her publications include topics on equity in the academy, Schoenberg, and teaching opera in prisons. Her book, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (University of Illinois Press, 2018) won the Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music and Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award from the American Musicological Society. Her other books include Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (2006) and the co-edited collections Blackness in Opera (2012), African Performance Arts and Political Acts (2021) and The Music of Mzilikazi Khumalo: Language, Culture, and Song in South Africa (2024). She has edited clusters of articles in African Studies, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society. In 2022 she testified before the US House Judiciary Committee supporting House Resolution 301, which would make “Lift Every Voice and Sing” a national hymn. During the 2022-2023 academic year she was the John E. Sawyer Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Actively engaged with performance today, she has worked with opera companies, symphonies, and other artistic institutions. She is the inaugural Scholar in Residence at the Seattle Opera (since 2019). She is a founding member of the Black Opera Research Network (BORN) and currently serves on the Boards of the American Musicological Society, the Kurt Weill Foundation, Detroit Opera, and Opera on Tap.
