Description
Join award-winning pianist Lara Downes, as she discusses her journey of being an artist of color in a discipline dominated by the white majority’s culture and history. Moderated by WHYY host, Cherri Gregg. Free to attend.
Pianist Lara Downes has been called “an explorer whose imagination is fired by bringing notice to the underrepresented and forgotten” (The Log Journal). An iconoclast and trailblazer, her dynamic work as a sought-after performer, a Billboard Chart-topping recording artist, a producer, curator, activist, and arts advocate positions her as a cultural visionary on the national arts scene. Ms. Downes’ musical roadmap seeks inspiration from the legacies of history, family, and collective memory, excavating the broad landscape of American music to create a series of acclaimed performance and recording projects that serve as gathering spaces for her listeners to find common ground and shared experience.
Cherri Gregg is the afternoon drive host/news anchor for WHYY radio. Prior to her current position, the award winning journalist covered civil rights, social justice, race and public affairs issues impacting marginalized communities in the Greater Philadelphia region, spending nearly a decade on air at KYW Newsradio. She served as the station’s Community Affairs reporter and was the creator, host and executive producer of the weekly, syndicated radio show and podcast, Flashpoint with Cherri Gregg. Under her leadership, the show earned two regional Edward R. Murrow Awards, an NABJ Salute to Excellence Award for Best Podcast and a Pennsylvania Bar Association Media Award all in 2021. Cherri, who is also a licensed attorney, is a past president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists