SAMMUS

Impact

Living by example is something we hear more often than we see. With Sammus, we see it. As a rapper, she looks inward mining for truths that she then expresses in a rhythmic flow over upbeat party beats.

As a self-proclaimed ‘Black weirdo,’ her aesthetic is a mashup of Black culture, nerd tropes, and afrofuturist expression. As a Black woman who rocks this aesthetic and creates music in a genre that is often narrow, she is expansive as she ‘lives by example.’

And now she defies more boundaries as a current professor. What a dope professor she must be!

Bio

Born to a Congolese father and Ivorian mother in Rhinebeck, New York, Sammus had an immediate passion for music and technology, producing her first songs using the MTV music generator and taking her name from the female protagonist of the video game Metroid.

A graduate of Cornell University, Sammus double majored in Sociology and Science & Technology before serving a brief but influential stint with Teach for America in Houson, Texas. She then returned to Cornell to pursue her MA & Doctorate in Science & Technology. After receiving both degrees and being awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University’s Cogut institute for the Humanities, she took up post as the Mellon Gateway Fellow and an assistant professor in Brown’s Department of Music where she continues her studies and teaches about the music of the African Diaspora.

In that time, Sammus has released three albums, made it onto the Billboard charts and refined her aesthetic expression of the “anxious black girl.” She continues to meld art and teach as a member of the collective theKEEPERS, which seeks to create an archive mapping women's contributions to hip hop, and the Director of Audio for Glow-Up Games, the first women of color led game company.