Stephen Lands is part of the 2026 JGI New Orleans Jazz Cohort. Hs is Baton Rouge-bred, New Orleans-based trumpeter and composer who’s had the distinct pleasure of performing with some of world’s greatest musicians, including touring and recording with the world-renowned Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Elvis Costello, Jazz at Lincoln Center alumni Herlin Riley, Wess “Warmdaddy” Anderson, Victor Goines and Ronald Westray, Shannon “King of Tremé” Powell, Jason Marsalis, Evan Christopher, Grammy nominees Cyrille Aimée and Jamison Ross, Quiana Lynell, and most recently, PJ Morton. 

‍

As a composer, he’s scored the music for a handful of projects with filmmaker Marion Hill, including 2021’s Sundance Film Festival Award-winning feature, “Ma Belle, My Beauty.” 

Hot on the heels of two sold-out debut performances of his current signature project, “Rearranging the Planets” for the Spring 2022 season at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), Lands has since been presenting new movements from this body of original compositions, such as the project’s little sister, “KosmiKrewe” aka “Cosmic Roux.” 

‍

Learn More: https://www.thestevelands.space/

Tonya Boyd-Cannon is part of the 2026 JGI New Orleans Jazz Cohort. She is a woman who does not simply perform music - she channels it, shapes it, teaches it, and uses it as a conduit for restoration. A classically trained musician and nationally recognized educator, Tonya brings a depth and intentionality to her craft that transcends genre. Her signature sound places vibe, storytelling, and soul-centered expression at the heart of every performance. Whether she’s moving listeners through heart-stretching ballads or igniting crowds with jazz, funk, rock, gospel, or blues, Tonya refuses limitations - her music ebbs, flows, and expands the moment it touches the air.

As a vocal phenomenon, she has built an illustrious career marked by multiple singles, EPs, full-length albums, and dynamic collaborations. Each release showcases her vocal mastery and her commitment to creating music that is as healing as it is sonically rich.

Her work has consistently garnered praise from both media and critics, solidifying her as a beloved creative force.

Her performances span global stages from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival to Colombia’s Mompox Jazz Festival yet her impact reaches far beyond the venue. Tonya leaves an imprint on the spirit. Her voice lingers. Her message resonates. Her presence shifts the room.

‍

Victor Campbell is a 2026 JGI New Orleans Jazz Cohort member and a young jazz piano player hailing from Camagüey, Cuba. His compelling style combines virtuosity, whimsy, charisma and technical prowess.Notably, it is just plain fun to watch Victor perform. He started playing piano at age 5 and went on to train at Cuba’s National School of the Arts. He has since played all over the United States and internationally. Victor first visited New Orleans in 2012 as a teenager, part of an exchange program with the Louis Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp. That visit changed his life and in 2019 Victor decided to move to New Orleans. He has been feverishly studying all styles of New Orleans music ever since, and incorporating it into his own musical language. He can effortlessly transition from a blues solo, to a Cuban timba montuno, and then right into a classical piano selection. In a 2019 interview, the great Chucho Valdés predicted that “Victor will revolutionize Cuban jazz piano.”

Aurora Nealand strives to live at the intersection of Lunatic and Librarian. She is part of the 2026 JGI New Orleans Jazz Cohort and a sound artist and multi-instrumentalist (saxophones, accordion, voice) based in New Orleans, LA .  She is deeply interested in the sonification of everyday objects and knowledge-generation through the stories and history that Sound (with a capital S) contains. Nealand is the leader of  The Royal Roses, the non-traditional Traditional Jazz band, which draws its approach to collective improvisation’s lineage, spanning from the New Orleans Early Jazz traditions, to the AACM, and collage-sound art and musique concrete. Nealand's other musical projects include The Monocle Ensemble - her original music project and installation ensemble, redrawblak Trio, Instigation Orchestra,  John Hollenbecks GEORGE, and the Danger Dangers.  In 2019/2020 she debuted KindHumanKind- a 90 minute fully staged theatrical show at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, based on her original music.  She is co-creator of the City Songs Project (created originally for Knoxvilles Big Ears Festival),  regularly works as a musical facilitator with Found Sound Nation -an organization which facilitates international musical collaboration, and she has been involved with the Walden School for Young Composers (as a teacher/performer) for 20 years.

Max Moran is a 2026 JGI New Orleans Jazz Cohort member and a Louisiana born musician and composer who has become a first-call bassist across several genres in New Orleans’ thriving music scene. Known for his versatility on electric bass, upright bass, and synthesizer, Moran provides a solid, soulful foundation to a number of classic and progressive bands. Performing since the age of thirteen, Max Moran spent over ten years as the bassist of jazz master Donald Harrison and has also shared the stage with artists such as Davell Crawford, Leo Nocentelli (The Meters), Bernie Worrell (Parliament/ Funkadelic), and Grammy nominees Christian Scott and Jamison Ross.

His band, Neospectric features a rotating cast of over a dozen of New Orleans' most exciting and virtuosic young instrumentalists whose collective sideman credits include Jonathan Batiste, Big Sam's Funky Nation, and Solange.

‍

Drummer Allan Mednard was born and raised in Queens, New York. His early musical experiences involved New York City's All-City High School Music program, Bayside High School's Academy of Music, and Queens College's Preparatory Studies in Music program. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in jazz performance from the City College of New York. He has performed around the globe with ensembles led by Jeremy Pelt, Ben Allison, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and many more.

Among the most celebrated jazz artists to emerge in the 21st century, Brandee Younger is a harpist, composer and bandleader whose music connects spiritual jazz and classical training to the rhythmic soulfulness of R&B and hip-hop. She grew up on Long Island, where she sang gospel, studied the harp classically and became enamored of both hip-hop and the vintage soul that rap producers sampled. When Younger was a teenager, her father introduced her to Alice Coltrane’s music — a transformative moment that all but defined her life’s journey.

Her first LP for the storied Impulse! Records label — a.k.a. The House That Trane Built — was 2021’s Somewhere Different. A track from that album, “Beautiful Is Black,” earned Younger a Grammy nomination in the Best Instrumental Composition category, making her the first Black female solo artist to achieve this. Two years later, on Brand New Life, Younger revitalized newly discovered Ashby compositions, and that LP won the 2024 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Jazz Album. Gadabout Season, released in 2025, is a more reflective and personal work focusing on Younger’s inimitable original music. In addition to her non-stop performance schedule, Younger is a dedicated educator, teaching on the faculties of New York University and the New School.

‍

Diane is a performer, composer and sound artist whose work often looks at sound and vibration as means of knowing and relating.

They aim to synthesize their years of research and relationship building around Gravitational Wave Astronomy with their ongoing creative work related to climate justice, and their lived experience as a person with a physical disability and navigating chronic pain. Central to this project would be continued collaboration with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) physicists (based in Louisiana and across the globe), and the prototyping of a new instrument—a “harp” sounded not by the strumming of strings, but by sunlight.

Diane is writing an article and developing a multidisciplinary project. They are collaborating with scientists, musicians, and filmmakers on a project that uses sound as a means for exploring the complex ecologies and histories of the Gulf of Mexico, centering one of its most endangered and little-known inhabitants, the recently-named Rice’s Whale, a being whose critically endangered status is connected directly to the sounds of industry and oil exploration in the Gulf.

While most people are aware that marine mammals rely on sound for basic survival, navigation, and communication, it’s less understood that oil companies and the U.S. military also rely on sound, that nearly every day of the year they use sonar guns to map the floor of the Gulf of Mexico for oil exploration. These sound waves have the capacity to kill animals who are close to their line of fire, to injure those who are further out, and, because of how sound travels underwater, to diminish the precious sonic space available for marine animals living across the entirety of the Gulf of Mexico. The prevalence of sonar blasts is just one contributing factor to soundscape of the Gulf, one with devastating consequences, that connects the well being of these marine mammals to those of us living in cancer alley, to all whose presence and futures are compromised by extractive fossil fuel economies.

‍

Dr. Christophe Jackson holds PhDs in piano performance, biology and mechanical engineering and a master’s degree in physician assistant where he studies the effects of music on cognition, performance and stress. He has completed postdoctoral training in Neuroscience and Music at Tulane University. Clinically, Jackson works as a neurosurgery, trauma, infectious disease, and urology surgical physician assistant where he utilizes his expertise to bridge access to healthcare, arts-based research, and technology. Outside of medicine, Jackson is a “musician at heart” having performed professionally as a classical and jazz pianist, keeping true to his New Orleans roots.

Josh Kun is an author and editor of many books and anthologies, and the curator of numerous art, music and public humanities projects. His research and practice focus on the arts, music and politics of cultural connection, with an emphasis on archives, global migration and Los Angeles. He has worked with The Getty Foundation, SFMOMA, the Grammy Museum, the California African American Museum, The Vincent Price Museum of Art, and more. From 2013–19, he led a trilogy of projects based on the special collections of the Los Angeles Public Library that resulted in a celebrated series of books, exhibitions, and public programs. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, and more. He co-edits the book series Refiguring American Music for Duke University Press, serves on the editorial boards of Public Culture, Journal of Popular Music Studies and the Music Research Annual, and on the boards of Dublab and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. He co-curates CALA Crossfade Lab and directs The Popular Music Project of the Norman Lear Center.

Awards and Honors:

MacArthur Fellow, MacArthur Foundation (2016)
Berlin Prize, American Academy in Berlin (2018)
American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation (2006)

‍

Timothy Mangin is the 2026 JGI New Orleans Fellow. He completed his PhD in Ethnomusicology at Columbia in 2013 with a dissertation on Senegalese mbalax advised by Prof. George Lewis. Mangin is an ethnomusicologist and musician researching the intersection of popular music, race, ethnicity, religion, and cosmopolitanism in West Africa and the African Diaspora. He has received fellowships from the Columbia University’s Center for Comparative Literature and Society, St. Lawrence University’s Department of Music, Mellon Foundation, the Foreign Language Areas Studies Program and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Abroad Program. Before joining the Boston College faculty he taught at Columbia University, New York University, St. Lawrence University, and the City University of New York. An improvisational flutist, Tim founded St. Lawrence University’s Jazz and Improv Ensemble and also studies mbira and is a member of Capoeira Brasil. His writings have appeared in the edited volumes Begegnungen: The World Meets Jazz and Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies as well as reviews in The Yearbook for Traditional Music and Ethnomusicology On-Line. Tim is working on a book examining indigenous cosmopolitanism through the intersection of the Senegalese urban dance music mbalax and the practice of black, Wolof (the dominant ethnic group), gendered, and Muslim identities. He is also exploring blackness in Senegalese hip hop and the dynamics of improvisation in New York City’s underground hip hop and jazz scene. The Digital Humanities is a key part of Tim’s pedagogy and research that began when he worked at Columbia’s Institute for Research in African American Studies on the Malcolm X Project, under the direction Manning Marable, and further developed with students at The City College of New York.