Althea SullyCole is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and ethnomusicologist from New York City.
Althea is currently an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montréal, QC. She was previously an Assistant Professor of Music at California State University, Monterey Bay. Althea received her PhD in ethnomusicology from Columbia University in February of 2023; an MA in ethnomusicology from Columbia University in 2018; an MA with distinction in Music in Development at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 2016; and a B.A. in ethnomusicology at Barnard College in 2012.
Althea studied her primary instrument, the kora, a 21-stringed West African harp, under korists Yacouba Sissoko and Edou Manga. She spent 3 years studying the instrument in Dakar, Senegal, where she was a resident artist at Bois Sakre studios. In addition to her solo work, she has worked with Billy Harper, Billy Bang, Fred Ho, Sahad Sarr, Daara J Family, Faada Freddy, Royal Messenger, LaFrae Sci, Lisette Santiago, Joseph Daley, Craig Harris and father Bill Cole (in his Untempered Ensemble), among others. In 2015, Althea formed the duo 42 Strings alongside traditional Chinese zheng player, Muqi Li, with whom she performed at Royal Albert Hall and on BBC 3 Radio. More recently, she performed at the Apollo Theatre in New York City with LaFrae Sci’s Groove Diplomacy Orchestra; the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. with Lisette Santiago’s project “In Her Voice”; and at the John L. Tishman Auditorium at the New School in New York City with Craig Harris’s project “Festac ’77′”. In addition to these special projects, you can find Althea performing solo and with her trio (with guitarist Alec Saelens and sax/flute player Ras Moshe). For more information about all of her upcoming performances, click here.
From 2024-2026, Althea will be performing research on an Award for Faculty from the National Endowment for the Humanities, 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. In the summer of 2023, Althea performed fieldwork in Senegal on a West African Research Association Post-Doctoral Fellowship. Previously, Althea was 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.
Althea has 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 Association for Cultural Equity (home of the Alan Lomax Archives); hosted and produced The Earfull, an audio podcast that explores the lives of musicians through music (Listen on iTunes); 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 was a Diversity Fellow (2017-18), Teaching Observation Fellow (2018) and Research Assistant in the African Languages Studies Department (2018-20). She was the 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 on request).
Althea can be found on facebook, instagram, soundcloud, linkedin, tumblr, twitter, tigmus, youtube, and spotify.
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(Photo credit: Jean-Baptiste Joire)