I Hope This Finds You Well
A new work work from composer and interdisciplinary artist Samora Pinderhughes
I Hope This Finds You Well is a multidisciplinary music work responding to testimonials of those harmed by incarceration, policing & detention. In moving between story and song, artist Samora Pinderhughes and his ensemble imagine a world that supports vulnerability — an artistic celebration of resilience, repair, and resistance.
Music, performance, installation, song-craft and language are used to shape and hold space for community engagement. It brings together the participatory energy of a concert, the character-driven structure of theater, and the guiding principle of a chorus. At its core are film projections and audio interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated community members. They provide the narrative thread of the work. These interviews were conducted over five years in 15 states across the U.S., and all the interviewees are directly involved as collaborators throughout the entire development process.
The ensemble includes piano, guitar, electronic production, bass, drums, small chamber orchestra (strings, woodwinds, horns), and a 10-person choir. As key collaborators in the development of the piece, the ensemble has cultivated a unique sound together over four years of working intimately. Pinderhughes and company’s collective bring an irresistible energy to the work — bringing the audience with them into their vision of another, better world. I Hope This Finds You Well operates as a portal into a society not built on perpetuating cruelty, domination, and punishment. It answers the questions: How do we survive in America? How do we support each other? What if we built a world around community care?
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Samora Pinderhughes is a multidisciplinary artist, composer, and filmmaker known for striking vulnerability and carefully crafted, radically honest art. He is also known for using his art to examine sociopolitical issues and fight for change. His rhizomatic practice as it stands today broadly encompasses sound, performance, installation, sculpture, and social practice. His artwork is renowned for its emotionality, its honesty about difficult and complex topics, and its careful details in word, image and sound. As an artist, Pinderhughes’ goal is that people will LIVE DIFFERENTLY after experiencing what he makes—that it will affect how they think, how
they act, how they relate to others, how they consider their daily relationships to their country and their world. The New York Times described Pinderhughes as a “visionary” who “turn(s) the experience of living in community inside-out, revealing all its personal detail and tension, and giving voice to registers of pain that are commonly shared but not often articulated.”
Pinderhughes has collaborated with artists across boundaries including Herbie Hancock, Glenn Ligon, Sara Bareilles, Common, Robert Glasper, Simone Leigh, Daveed Diggs, Kyle Abraham, Titus Kaphar, and his mentor Anna Deavere Smith.
Pinderhughes is also the Artistic & Executive Director of The Healing Project, a community arts organization that creates narrative change and collective healing in partnership with individuals impacted by structural violence to build a world based around healing rather than punishment.
Pinderhughes is the 2025 MoMA Adobe Creative Resident. He was the first-ever Art for Justice + Soros Justice Fellow and a recipient of Chamber Music America’s 2020 Visionary Award. He is also a United States Artist Fellow, Creative Capital awardee, and Sundance Composers Lab fellow. Pinderhughes also scored the award-winning documentaries Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, Whose Streets?, and The Strike.
Born and raised in the Bay Area, Pinderhughes began playing music at two years old and started piano at seven. His life changed forever when he was granted entry into the Young Musicians Choral Orchestra program, a free program for Bay Area youth, where he first studied harmony, learned about jazz, and began composing. After graduating high school, Samora moved to New York to study at The Juilliard School under master teachers Kenny Barron, Frank Kimbrough and Kendall Briggs. It was also during this time that he met his primary artistic mentors, Anna Deavere Smith and Vijay Iyer. Through both his own community work and as a leader of The Healing Project, Pinderhughes engages in impact campaigns that fight to free incarcerated people, narrative projects that support historically oppressed communities, and healing rooms that seek to use music & language as collaborative healing forces.
UPCOMING
August 18 - September 6, 2025
ArtYard Residency
Frenchtown, NJ
ENGAGE
Pomegranate Arts is currently seeking development partners for “I Hope This Finds You Well”. Please contact us at info@pomarts.com for more information.
Image credits: Lawrence Sumulong and Walter Wlodarczyk
“Samora Pinderhughes has emerged as one of the most affecting singer-songwriters today, in any genre.”
— The New York Times