Name: Karen Wilson
Category: The Arts: African-American Music and Stories
Title: Assistant Director of the Gluck Fellows Program
Degree: Ph.D. in history from UCR
Areas of Expertise: Karen Wilson is a singer-storyteller, scholar and teaching artist who was born in Harlem, New York. Karen sings music across the spectrum of the African Diaspora in the United States including spirituals, calls, hollers, jazz, blues and rhythm and blues. She collected and premiered "A Tribute To Blueswomen: Beauty and the Blues" with her group, Blue Wave-New York. With Blue Wave-West, she created and premiered, "The Cool Intellectuality of Wise Women's Blues: Ida Cox and Friends."
Recognition: Presidential Fellow and a member of a Mellon Foundation Interdisciplinary Workshop in the Humanities on Intellectual Activity Outside of the Academy: Self-Trained Thinkers, Activists, and Artists in the African Diaspora.
Outside Activities: She has traveled and performed with Pete Seeger and was a member of the Edward Boatner Chorale. Her performance of Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem "The Party" was broadcast on PBS as part of the "Favorite Poem Project." As a member of Blue Wing Dance Co. she premiered "Haunted Red" with them at the Merce Cunningham Studio in New York City during their 1999 season. She has spoken and presented on the intellectual and cultural life in the African American Slave Quarter Community on college campuses across the United States.
Karen has told stories at Clearwater's Hudson River Revival, New York's Metropolitan Museum, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and it's Central Park Zoo and the Museum of Fine Arts in Ponce, Puerto Rico. She pioneered the teaching of African-American Vocal History for the Symphony Space Arts-in-Education Program in the New York City public schools, was Artist-in-Residence at the Elizabeth Morrow School in Englewood, New Jersey and has held residencies in public and independent schools across the United States.
Her Ph.D. work identified African intellectual and cultural presence in the United States and Caribbean in US History and linked it to World History. She also writes on African American women and their beautiful Blues.
Languages Spoken: English
E-mail: karen.wilson@ucr.edu
Phone: (951) 827-3518
Preferred Media: Print, Radio, Video
Media Contact:
- Bettye Miller
bettye.miller@ucr.edu
(951) 827-7847