Distinguished Lecture Series with Jasmine Henry

Jasmine Henry (she/her) is an assistant professor of musicology and Wolf Humanities Center fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include Black electronic dance music, independent music production, and Afrofuturism. Her current book project focuses on the history of Black urban club music and party cultures in Newark, New Jersey and how contemporary participants navigate the transhistorical cultural politics of Black club music production and performance on local, regional, and global levels. Henry's recent articles and reviews on popular music, race, and production appear in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Society for American Music, and Popular Culture Studies Journal. Henry’s scholarly practices are deeply informed by her own music production background. As a live sound engineer, she has entertained international audiences through her work on critically acclaimed productions such as the Blue Man Group, HBO’s The Newsroom, and Broadway’s Chicago the Musical. From 2017 to 2022, she served as the Media Lab Director at the Newark School of the Arts, where she provided youth from historically marginalized backgrounds with access to music technologies and industry knowledge.