Althea SullyCole is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and ethnomusicologist from New York City. She is currently based in Montréal, QC, where she is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University. She holds a doctorate in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University.

Althea studied her primary instrument, the kora, a 21-stringed harp from the Mandé region of West Africa, under korists Yacouba Sissoko and Edou Manga. She spent 3 years studying the instrument in Dakar, Senegal. In addition to her solo work, she has worked with Billy Harper, Billy Bang, Fred Ho, Daara J Family, Sahad Sarr, Royal Messenger, LaFrae Sci, Lisette Santiago, Joseph Daley, Craig Harris and father Bill Cole, among many others. In 2015, Althea formed the duo 42 Strings alongside gu zheng player, Muqi Li, with whom she performed at Royal Albert Hall and on BBC 3 Radio in London. More recently, she has been an artist-in-residence at University of California Davis, California State University Monterey Bay and Santa Clara University and given performances at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston solo; at the Apollo Theatre in New York City with LaFrae Sci’s Groove Diplomacy Orchestra; and at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. with Lisette Santiago’s project “In Her Voice.” Althea’s debut album, Due West, is set to be released on July 11th, 2025. 

From 2024-2026, Althea will be performing research on an Award for Faculty from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the United States, which, among other things, will fund fieldwork in Mali and Guinea in support of her scholarship on historical collections of musical instruments from the Mandé region of West Africa. Previously, Althea was a West African Research Association Post-Doctoral Fellow (2023), a Sylvan C. Coleman and Pam Coleman Memorial Fund Fellow in the Musical Instruments Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2020-22) and Dean’s Fellow in the Music Department at Columbia University (2017-22). She is currently the co-chair of the Organology Special Interest Group and Secretary of the African and African Diasporic Music section at the Society for Ethnomusicology. Her publications include articles in Ethnomusicology, the World of Music, the Galpin Society Journal and the American Music Instrument Society Online.

Previously, Althea was Assistant Professor of Music at California State University, Monterey Bay. In addition to her PhD in ethnomusicology from Columbia University, which she received in February of 2023, Althea holds an MA in ethnomusicology from Columbia University (awarded in 2018); an MA with distinction in Music in Development at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (2016); and a BA in ethnomusicology at Barnard College (2012).

Althea is the host and producer of The Earfull, an audio podcast that explores the lives of musicians through music. She has also worked as an FCC-licensed radio programmer in the jazz department at WKCR; interned in the Public Programming department at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; worked as an archivist for the Association for Cultural Equity (home of Alan Lomax’s Archives);; performed field and archival research at the Musee de Thies in Senegal; worked as a music specialist at the International School of Dakar; and was Music Programs Editor at SOAS Radio. At Columbia University, she served as a Diversity Fellow (2017-18), Teaching Observation Fellow (2018) and Research Assistant in the African Languages Studies Department (2018-20). She was as an Associate Editor of Current Musicology from 2019-20 and a contributing editor to AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, from 2018-2020. Althea has given a number of talks and facilitated panels at the Society for Studies in Africana Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center, the People’s Forum, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Left Forum, the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy and the African Studies Association.

CV available upon request.