Originally from Spartanburg, South Carolina, Lydia studied voice at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, then moved to Amherst, MA, where they earned a Bachelor’s of Music in Vocal Performance and Music History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2017.

Lydia then decided to “take a break” from music and join the United States Peace Corps. They taught middle school English at a rural public school in Benin, West Africa from 2018-2020, and coordinated a national girls’ scholarship program with the Batonga Foundation.

There was, of course, plenty of music in Benin, which reignited Lydia’s musical passion! In 2020, Lydia began a PhD in Cross-Cultural Musicology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where they study gender, music, and migration in northwest Africa, in interdisciplinary perspective.

Thanks to the support of the United States Fulbright Commission, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Council for American Overseas Research, and the Zeit-Stiftung Bucerius “Beyond Borders” program, Lydia carried out more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Morocco and Senegal. They will defend their PhD dissertation, “‘I Don’t Have Borders’: Gender, Music, and Migration in Northwest Africa,” in 2027.

Lydia sings professionally in the Bay Area of California. They make sound in new works by composers in California, sing soprano as a soloist and in choirs around the Central Coast, and occasionally lend their voice to student productions at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They have trained in Western classical bel canto singing, Andalusi and Levantine art song, and American and Irish folk singing styles.

As an educator, Lydia is passionate about facilitating a student-centered classroom that follows the guidelines of Active Learning and Universal Design of Teaching. They hold a certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. They speak French, Spanish, Moroccan Arabic, and Bariba, a local language in northern Benin. For fun, Lydia loves to ride their bicycle as far as they can. Most recently, they cycled around the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. They enjoy dancing badly in public and baking without a recipe.