Contact:
kamara@kamarathomas.com
Kamara is available for performances, teaching and speaking engagements, commissions and collaborations.
Kamara Thomas is a songspeller, ritualist and multidisciplinary storyteller based in Durham, NC. She uses her musical "storyworks" as containers for community storytelling and symbol-making, aimed at the re/invention of collective mythologies and in the pursuit of surprising and disruptive storytelling forms.
Kamara's productions are site specific, collaborative and multi-faceted— weaving together music/theatre performance, land-based ritual, oral history and communal artmaking, and activating galleries, stages and public spaces. Developmental processes are frequently distilled into works on film/video.
As a Princeton Arts Fellow and lecturer, Kamara taught songwriting and musical storytelling, and presented iterations of two of her storyworks-- Xulgaria and Tularosa: An American Dreamtime, which received a 2022 MAP grant. Live performance iterations of Tularosa have been featured at Santa Fe Art Institute and Boulder Museum of History; and film/video iterations include The Death of Nebuchadnezzar (shot in the White Sands Desert) and Good Luck America, which documented work from an agitprop theatre performance that activated public spaces throughout downtown Durham.
Kamara also spearheads Country Soul Songbook, a curation and production team rooted in the mission to amplify BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ voices in country, Americana, rock and roots music.
