Center for the Study of Social Difference – Women Creating Change co-sponsors For the Daughters of Harlem: Working in Sound, a two-day music workshop for young women of color from New York public high schools. The workshop will culminate in a reception and showcase of students’ musical work, produced under the guidance of workshop leaders Sondra Woodruff, Rachel Devorah, Seth Cluett, and Kamari Carter. As part of the event, musicologist Matthew D. Morrison will engage in conversation with award-winning producer Ebonie Smith about her advocacy for more inclusive spaces in music production and technology.

Ebonie Smith is an award-winning music producer, audio engineer and singer songwriter, as well as founder and president of Gender Amplified, a nonprofit organization that celebrates and supports women and girls in music production. Smith is an alumna of Barnard College, Columbia University, and New York University.

Matthew D. Morrison is Assistant Professor of Music at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and 2018-2019 Hutchins Fellow, W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute, Harvard University. His research explores race and performance, and is working on a book titled Blacksound: Making Race and Identity in American Popular Music. Morrison received a PhD in Historical Musicology from Columbia University.

The project is supported by an Action Grant from Humanities New York and a Public Outreach Grant from Columbia University’s Center for Science and Society. Additional funds from the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, the Department of Sociology, the Center for Ethnomusicology, the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program, the Computer Music Center, the Department of Music, and the Center for the Study of Social Difference – Women Creating Change at Columbia University, as well as the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Barnard College make the event possible. 

The Daughters initiative is directed by Lucie Vágnerová, Core Lecturer in Music, and Ellie Hisama, Professor of Music.