Rhiannon Giddens’ Biscuits & Banjos Festival
GRAMMY & Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens’ new festival is dedicated to the celebration and exploration of Black music, art and culture in her home state of North Carolina. Biscuits & Banjos is a 3-day festival to exchange ideas, expand conversations, uplift traditions, and trace the musical and geographical connections of old time, country, Americana, folk, jazz and blues to highlight their complicated origins. The festival will champion Black artists and creators, offering robust musical performances alongside secondary programming to include lectures, workshops and readings from authors, chefs, visual artists, and more. Black culture is not a monolith, and this gathering will provide an opportunity for those working outside the mainstream to come together in community, as well as showing the similar journeys the culture has taken across music, food, and literature.
The festival will launch in Durham, NC in April 2025 to honor the 20th Anniversary of the Black Banjo Gathering – a landmark musical summit held in Boone, NC in 2005 that became the impetus behind the creation of GRAMMY-winning black string band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, which launched Rhiannon's career. Rhiannon immediately identified Durham as the ideal location to house Biscuits & Banjos given her personal connection to the city and its diverse reach and thriving contemporary culture, as well as its historical Black heritage.
Unmanageable is the non-profit partner of Biscuits & Banjos, and provides fundraising and festival management support.
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ABOUT RHIANNON
Rhiannon Giddens has made a singular, iconic career out of stretching her brand of folk music, with its miles-deep historical roots and contemporary sensibilities, into just about every field imaginable. A two-time GRAMMY Award-winning singer and multi-instrumentalist, MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, Pulitzer Prize winner, and composer of opera, ballet, and film, Giddens has centered her work around the mission of lifting up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been overlooked or erased, and advocating for a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins through art.
A founding member of the landmark, Grammy-winning black string band, Carolina Chocolate Drops, and all female banjo supergroup, Our Native Daughters (Allison Russell, Leyla McCalla, Amethyst Kiah), Giddens’ is as much a curator as a creator. She was a Perspectives Artist at Carnegie Hall (2020-2023), is a Southern Futures Artist-in-Resident at UNC Chapel Hill (2021-2024), and began her work as the Artistic Director of the Yo-Yo Ma founded non-profit and musical ensemble, Silkroad, in 2020.
Giddens has published children's books and written and performed music for the soundtrack of Red Dead Redemption II, one of the best-selling video games of all time. She has appeared on ABC hit drama Nashville and throughout Ken Burns’ Country Music series, also on PBS. Giddens sang for the Obamas at the White House; is a three-time NPR Tiny Desk Concert alum; and hosts her own show on PBS, My Music with Rhiannon Giddens, as well as the Aria Code podcast, which is produced by New York City’s NPR affiliate station WQXR. Most recently, her fretless banjo can be heard on Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” – the first song from a black female artist to ever hit #1 on the Billboard Country Music charts.
She is also an avid biscuit baker.