Sunday 24 May 2026, 7.30pm
Joy Guidry is a bassoonist, versatile improviser, performance artist, and composer of experimental, daring new works that embody a deep love of storytelling; Joy’s music channels her inner child in honor of their ancestors and predecessors. The San Diego Tribune has hailed her performances as “lyrical and haunting...hair-raising and unsettling.” Joy was born in Houston, Texas, into a creative family that has shaped who she is today.
Joy has presented her original work at The The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum for American Art, Hauser & Wirth, among many other venues. She has been commissioned by The National Sawdust, Long Beach Opera, JACK Quartet, Gaudeamus Festival, and the I&I Foundation. Joy has been featured in festivals like the La Biennale di Venezia, Banlieues Bleues festival, A'Larme Festival, Cologne Jazz Week, and many more. Joy holds a bachelor’s degree in Bassoon Performance from the Peabody Conservatory and a Graduate Performance Diploma from the Mannes School of Music. In addition, Joy Guidry is the winner of the 2021 Berlin Prize for Young Artists. She is currently playing on a Heckel Bassoon number 6101.
Her latest record, Five Prayers, is an intuitive convergence of sound, spirit, and radical self- expression. A celebrated voice in experimental and avant-garde music spaces, Guidry pushes sonic boundaries rooted in Black sonic traditions. With this new album, she shifts away from free jazz and into a meditative, ambient realm. In the live performance, Guidry blends bassoon with low rumbling synths, warm electronic sounds, praise breaks, distortion, and heavy bass that reflect the artist’s lived experience as a Black trans woman from the South. Five Prayers is a profound act of self-exploration and liberation, offering audiences a raw, vulnerable, and transcendent musical journey.
Chloe Filani an artist, poet, and performer using the intersections of Blackness, womanhood and ancestral knowing. Her work pulses with power, vulnerability, and a language that refuses to be tamed.
Using poetry and embodied dance performance, Chloe channels myth, memory and personal cosmology into presence. Her work feels less like performance than invocation, with voice, gesture and language opening space for new imaginaries.
Her poetry has been published in Playing Femme by 16NSt Gallery Press, Boy Brother Friend, and Montez Press’ Interjection Calendar. Her work has also appeared in live recorded form across the Anthems podcast, a 180 Studios vinyl release with the poetry collective Black Geographies, Touching Bass for Resident Advisor, and NTS Live with Ruby Savage.
She has performed her poetry at Late at Tate, ICA, Somerset House, Prim Black x Burberry, Blackgirl picnic, Writerz Scribez, Royal Academy, 180 Studios and Reference Point.
