UW Public Lectures: From Artistic Joy to Collective Wellness

Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a 2017 TED Global Fellow, an inaugural recipient of the
Guggenheim Social Practice initiative, and an honoree of the United States Artists
Rockefeller Fellowship. Bamuthi’s opera libretto, We Shall Not Be Moved, was named one
of 2017’s “Best Classical Music Performances” by The New York Times. His evening length
work created in collaboration with composer Daniel Bernard Roumain, “The Just and
The Blind,” was commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered to a sold out house at
Carnegie in March 2019. His upcoming opera “Watch Night” is inspired by the forgiveness
exhibited by the congregation of Emanuel AME church in Charleston, and will premiere at
The Perelman Center in New York in 2023.

In addition to his successful artistic career, Bamuthi serves as Vice President and Artistic
Director of Social Impact at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in
Washington, DC. He has also been enlisted as a strategic partner or consultant for
companies ranging from Coca Cola to Carnegie Hall – and his TED talk on linking sport to
freedom design among immigrant youth has been viewed more than 1 million times.
Bamuthi’s community development philosophy, called “The Creative Ecosystem”, has
been implemented in dozens of cities across the United States and is the subject of
several critical writings, including one of the seminal essays in “Cultural Transformations:
Youth and Pedagogies of Possibility”, published by Harvard Education Press.

Bamuthi is also the founding Program Director of the exemplary non-profit Youth Speaks,
and is a co-founder of Life is Living, a national series of one-day festivals which activate
under-resourced parks and affirm peaceful urban life. His essays have been published in
Harvard Education Press; he has lectured at more than 200 colleges, and has carried
adjunct professorships at Stanford and Lehigh, among others. A proud alumnus of
Morehouse College, Bamuthi received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the
California College of Arts in the Spring of 2022.