Kamara Thomas is a singer, songspeller, multidisciplinary storyteller and a Princeton Arts Fellow, teaching songwriting, storytelling and performance.
Kamara’s leads collaborative, multidisciplinary play and community art-making processes that investigate the storytelling spaces on the spectrum between campfire and movie screen. Kamara and her collaborators create site-specific “storytelling environments” — installation plus performance— that weave together music and experimental sound, theater, filmmaking, ritual, and visual elements including masks, nature-works, sculpture, archival material and photography. Storyworks are site-specific and iterative, taking place in both traditional and uncoventional spaces, in-person, in community and on film.
Iterations of the storywork Tularosa: An American Dreamtime have taken place at Princeton’s Hurley Gallery and Richardson Auditorium, the campus of Santa Fe Art Institute, and public spaces in downtown Durham, NC. Kamara’s storywork Xulgaria will be presented at the the Lewis Center for the Arts in 2024.
Kamara has received grants from MAP Fund, Whippoorwill Arts, Arnold Shultz Fund, Durham Arts Council and North Carolina Arts Council. She has been commissioned by Santa Fe Art Institute, No Depression, Duke University, University of North Carolina and Cassilhaus.
Kamara is based in Durham, NC, where she spearheads Country Soul Songbook, an artist-driven media platform and production team rooted in the mission to amplify historically marginalized voices (BIPOC/LGBTQIA+) in country and American roots music.