TAA Musings

MTSU Tucker Theatre, Boutwell Dramatic Arts Building

Eli Yamin (“Dr. E”) is an internationally renowned pianist, composer and educator, and is co-founder and managing and artistic director of Jazz Power Initiative(JPI), a twenty-two-year-old nonprofit. The organization transforms lives through jazz arts education and performance. His work combines jazz, theatre, and performance to engage young people and expand access to arts education, particularly in African American and Latin American communities central to jazz’s origins. Yamin has performed at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and the White House, and has toured more than twenty countries as a cultural ambassador for the United States. He is the creator of three original jazz musicals for youth performers who perform alongside professional musicians—Nora’s Ark (about climate and social change), Holding the Torch for Liberty (about women’s suffrage), and Message from Saturn (about the healing power of the blues)—which have been staged in four languages across five countries and fourteen states, with performances in New York at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Jazzmobile/Summerfest, and Lehman College. Yamin has released multiple recordings spanning jazz and blues and has collaborated with numerous artists including Illinois Jacquet and Claire Daly, whose album Swing Low is on display at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library.

Yamin holds degrees from Rutgers University, Lehman College, and Stony Brook University, and is a Steinway Artist. He is a lifelong educator who was mentored by a host of master artists including Barry Harris and Mercedes Ellington. Yamin has brought jazz education to more than 9,000 youth and 1,000 artists and teachers worldwide through JPI and the Jazz Power Institute for Artists and Educators. At Jazz at Lincoln Center, he designed and led the Middle School Jazz Academy for a decade and trained more than one hundred musicians as cultural ambassadors through the United States Department ofState. He also created Syncopated Leadership, an arts-based leadership workshop experienced by more than 2,500 professionals, and his instructional work has reached millions online. Yamin is the author of So You Want to Sing the Blues: A Guide for Performers, published in partnership with the National Association of Teachers of Singing. In 2024, he received the award for excellence in jazz education from the American Academy of Teachers of Singing. He was named a 2026 Manhattan Jazz Hero by the Jazz Journalists Association.

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Tucker Theatre, Boutwell Dramatic Arts Building

Joyce Scott works across media, confronting racism, sexism, violence, inequality, oppression, and injustice, while also engaging beauty, spirituality, nature, and healing. Her work explores the complex tapestry of collective history and unearths universal truths. She is best known for her mastery of the off-loom peyote stitch, a free-form glass bead weaving technique that merges beads, blown glass, and repurposed objects with autobiographical, sociological, and political themes. Born in Baltimore to parents from North Carolina—sharecroppers and descendants of enslaved people—Scott began her career creating fiber works including clothing, jewelry, shoes, and quilts, while experimenting with loom-constructed textiles. In the late 1970s, she turned to beads, drawn to their ability to capture light and blend color beyond traditional painting. She learned the peyote stitch from a Native American bead artisan, a technique that would define much of her work. By 1997, Scott expanded into printmaking, producing hundreds of works with ateliers including Goya-Girl Press and Pyramid Atlantic, and later Sol Print Studios and Goya Contemporary. In 1999, she held a landmark solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, becoming the first Black female artist to receive this honor.

In 2016, working with Gary Garrido Schneider and Amy Raehse, Scott began developing her largest exhibition at Grounds For Sculpture in New Jersey. It opened in 2017 and featured historic and recent works, including two large-scale, site-specific sculptures focused on Harriet Tubman. Scott’s exhibitions and contributions have continued into the 2020s, including significant retrospectives and solo presentations. In March 2024, she opened a fifty-year traveling retrospective, Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams, co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Seattle Art Museum. Scott is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Instituto Allende in Mexico and has received numerous honorary degrees from California College of the Arts, New York University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Baltimore. Her work is held in major collections worldwide, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Seattle Art Museum, the Chrysler Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art.