Jason Moran

Pianist, educator, and visual artist Jason Moran (b. 1975 in Houston, TX) earned a degree from the ManhattanSchool of Music, where he studied with Jaki Byard. Moran has recorded 20 critically acclaimed solo recordings for Blue Note Records and his label Yes Records. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010 and was recently inducted into the Academy of Arts and Sciences. Moran is the inaugural recipient of the Gordon Parks Fellowship in Music. He has composed scores for Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet, Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence Dance Company, Kyle Abraham’s AIM and the Martha Graham Dance Company. He has collaborated with artists Joan Jonas, Kara Walker, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Julie Mehretu and Glenn Ligon. He has had solo art exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, MCA Denver, and the Walker Art Museum, and Mass Moca. He scored the films SELMA and 13th by Ava DuVernay and is currently working on her latest film about the 14th Amendment. He and his wife Alicia Hall Moran were named artists in the Whitney Biennial, The Venice Biennial and created the touring concert Two Wings: The Music of Black America in Migration for Carnegie Hall. Working broadly, Moran aims for the intersections between music and the world. This lead to collaborations with to an array of people including novelists Haruki Murakami, skateboarder Mark Gonzale and poet Elizabeth Alexander. He was the Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center from 2011-2025 and currently curates the Artist Studio series at the Park Avenue Armory. As a curator, Moran created the permanent exhibition Here to Stay for the newly opened Louis Armstrong Museum in Queens and co-curated the exhibition I’ve Seen the Wall: Louis Armstrong on Tour in the GDR 1965 at DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam. He currently teaches at the New England Conservatory.