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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 and works in the tradition of the black surrealists, those who bend word, sound, and image towards the causes of revolution. 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. 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.

The New York Times described Pinderhughes’ most recent album GRIEF as a “visionary” work from “one of the most affecting singer-songwriters today, in any genre” that “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, Glenn Ligon, Sara Bareilles, Simone Leigh, Daveed Diggs, Kyle Abraham, Titus Kaphar, 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 new albums August Greene and Let Love with Common, Robert Glasper, and Karriem Riggins. He has performed his compositions at Carnegie Hall, the Sundance Film Festival, and the Kennedy Center, and toured internationally with artists including Branford Marsalis, Christian Scott, Jose James, and Emily King.
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 is also an alumnus of YoungArts. While living in Cuba as a teenager, he developed a sense of artistic purpose, and renewed its political direction through the writings of James Baldwin. 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.
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, co-written by Christophe Abiel and Jeremie Harris. This was followed by The Black Spring EP in 2020, produced with Jack DeBoe, and the song, film & interactive digital space Process. He is also the creator of The Healing Project, a massive multidisciplinary project that examines trauma & healing from incarceration, detention, and structural violence. This project was recently awarded a $1 million grant from The Mellon Foundation to expand its work in myriad ways.

Pinderhughes is 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 Creative Capital awardee, a Joe’s Pub / Public Theater NYC Artist-in-Residence, and a Sundance Composers Lab fellow. 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 documentary Whose Streets? and the Field of Vision film Concussion Protocol. The short film for his song Process, directed with Christian Padron, won 2021’s Best Experimental Film award at Blackstar Film Festival. 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.
Pinderhughes fights for abolition through both art and activism. The Healing Project reflects that ethic: developed over the past eight years, the ongoing project is based on Pinderhughes’ interviews with 50 incarcerated and formerly incarcerated narrators, and involves sustained collaboration with over 50 different artists working across a range of mediums. “What took a long time,” Pinderhughes notes, “was just us supporting each other. Talking to folks about their stories, and then life comes up, so you have to support people, and we have to support each other.” The first version of The Healing Project was presented to critical acclaim in 2023 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Kitchen, and Carnegie Hall; it has expanded in 2024 to include impact campaigns that fight to free incarcerated people through narrative change, in addition to the expansion of its creative works around the world.

Pinderhughes’ GRIEF, an album of original songs and lyrics inspired by The Healing Project’s interviews, blooms from the same soil. The collection extends Pinderhughes’ forceful commitment to political transformation, and renders it through a beautiful interiority held by a chorus of voices. Featuring collaborations with Immanuel Wilkins, Marcus Gilmore, Elena Pinderhughes, Argus Quartet and others, the album soars in its stunning harmonies, resonant vocals, and textured storytelling. As Pinderhughes explains, GRIEF invites the listener “to enter the most vulnerable parts of the self,” while never losing a sense of being accompanied. The album is an artistic witness to the times, inspired by Nina Simone and James Baldwin.

Across his oeuvre, Pinderhughes’ music stands out in its simultaneous emotionality, attention to urgent social questions, and virtuosic & detailed technical craft.