Samora Pinderhughes

Samora Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist, vocalist, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist known for striking intimacy and carefully crafted, radically honest lyrics alongside high-level musicianship. He is also known for using his music to examine sociopolitical issues and fight for change. Pinderhughes is a prison abolitionist and an advocate for process over product. His music is renowned for its emotionality, its honesty about difficult and vulnerable topics, and its careful details in word and sound. Pinderhughes is also the Founder, Artistic & Executive Director of THE HEALING PROJECT, a community arts organization that creates narrative change and collective healing in partnership with individuals impacted by structural violence to build a world based around healing rather than punishment. Pinderhughes is the 2025 MoMA Adobe Creative Resident. He was also the first-ever Art for Justice + Soros Justice Fellow and a recipient of Chamber Music America’s 2020 Visionary Award. He has also been designated as a United States Artist awardee, a Creative Capital awardee, a Kennedy Center Social Practice Fellow, and a Sundance Composers Lab Fellow. The New York Times described Pinderhughes as a “visionary” who “turn(s) the experience of living in community inside-out, revealing all its personal detail and tension, and giving voice to registers of pain that are commonly shared but not often articulated.” Pinderhughes has collaborated with many artists across boundaries and scenes including Herbie Hancock, Common, Simone Leigh, Glenn Ligon, Sara Bareilles, Daveed Diggs, Titus Kaphar, Emily King, and Lalah Hathaway. He works frequently with Common on compositions for music and film, and is featured as a composer, lyricist, vocalist, and pianist on the albums August Greene and Let Love with Common, Robert Glasper, and Karriem Riggins. He has been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the Sundance Film Festival, and the Apollo Theater, and has had exhibitions and artwork at The Kitchen, San Jose Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum. As an artist, Pinderhughes’ goal is that people will LIVE DIFFERENTLY after experiencing what he makes—that it will affect how they think, how they act, how they relate to others, how they consider their daily relationships to their country and their world. 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. 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, Anna Deavere Smith. He is a graduate of The Juilliard School and is currently getting his Ph.D. at Harvard University in the Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry program under the direction of Vijay Iyer. Pinderhughes also scored the award-winning documentaries “Going to Mars”, “The Strike”, and “Whose Streets?”. He is a member of Blackout for Human Rights, the arts & social justice collective founded by Ryan Coogler and Ava DuVernay, and was musical director for their #MLKNow and #JusticeForFlint events.

Music, Film, Storytelling, and Healing from structural violence

What if we built our world around healing?

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