KAMARA THOMAS

Program Fellow

Kamara Thomas is a singer, songspeller, mythology fanatic and multidisciplinary storyteller based in Durham, NC. Her storytelling is collaborative and multi-faceted– weaving together musical and theater performance, community art-making, ritual, and visual elements including film, masks, archival material and photography.  

Kamara is currently developing “Tularosa: An American Dreamtime'' in collaboration with the Denver-based theater company Band of Toughs. Based on her 2022 eponymous album and song-cycle, the staged storywork interrogates the mythology of the American West as it seeks to unearth, reinvent and heal the American mythologies that underpin collective cultural identity. The storywork will be the final, integrative installment of a series of experimental, multidisciplinary works including #9 - a pandemic performance for nine social-distancers (2020), the videos Good Luck America (2018) and Oh Gallows (2016), and Soapbox (2018), a community-based, multi-site public performance in downtown Durham, NC.

Kamara also spearheads Country Soul Songbook, an artist-driven and -focused media platform and production team rooted in the mission to amplify historically marginalized voices (BIPOC/LGBTQIA+) in Country, Americana and American roots music. 

As a songwriter and musician, Kamara spent over a decade in New York fronting numerous bands – most notably hard rock trio Earl Greyhound and Kamara Thomas & The Ghost Gamblers. She also founded Honky Tonk Happy Hour, a seminal force of the early-aughts NYC alt-country scene.

Thomas has commissioned work for Cassilhaus, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina, and joins the faculty of Princeton University as an Arts Fellow in 2022.