Kavita Shah - COMPOSER
Kavita Shah (she/her) is an award-winning vocal composer, singer, ethnomusicology researcher, educator, and lifelong New Yorker hailed by NPR for possessing an “amazing dexterity for musical languages.” Her original projects blending modern jazz, new music, and world traditions include Visions (2014), Folk Songs of Naboréa (2017), Interplay (2018, nominated for France’s Victoires de la Musique for Jazz Album of the Year), and Cape Verdean Blues (2023). Kavita performs her music at major concert halls, festivals, and clubs on six continents, and her work has been supported by New Music America, Chamber Music America, Jerome Foundation, Camargo Foundation, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and Park Avenue Armory. Her collaborators include NEA Jazz Master Sheila Jordan, Martial Solal, MacArthur Genius Miguel Zenón, Lionel Loueke, François Moutin, and Miho Hazama. A 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Fellow, she is currently working on an album of original music for her jazz quintet about the journey to her ancestral villages in rural India, as well as her first full-length opera on the subject of child migration.
Kavita holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from Harvard, an M.M. in Jazz Voice from Manhattan School of Music, and speaks nine languages. A fierce advocate for gender and racial equity in the arts, she was also a founding member of the We Have Voice Collective and the Ori-Gen Collective.