Artist. Producer.Educator | Connector of dots…

Preeminent Improvisational Vocalist, Author, Producer, GRAMMY-nominated musician, and multi-disciplinary fine artist most recently awarded the S&R Evermay Washington Award and DCCAH Artist Fellowship. KOKAYI is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow for Music Composition (the first emcee to be granted a Guggenheim for music composition), Halcyon Arts Fellow, and Nicholson Arts Fellow,  has been a TEDxWDC presenter, speaking on “collaboration and the creative economy,” and has served as Artist in Residence at Music Meeting in Nijmegen, NL. He can be heard on over 60 titles: Jazz, Hip Hop, Rock, and R&B. About his book "You Are Ketchup: and Other Fly Music Tales" (Globe Pequot), the Washington Post writes, “written in a tone so conversational you can practically hear it in your ear, “You Are Ketchup” feels like a megadose of straight advice from a muso-mentor who’s been there. And, of course, Kokayi has been all over the place.” 

KOKAYI has taught and facilitated workshops at the School of Improvisational Music, teaching vocal improvisation as it relates to Jazz and Hip Hop, at Monash (Melbourne, AU), Universidade Lusíada (Lisbon, PT), Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, NYU, and San Francisco State. He collaborates, mentors, and serves on the Board of the international arts program OneBeat and has worked as a freelance music emissary with the U.S. State Department. He is the Chief Ideator and co-curator of BeatsnBeans: a discussion series on creativity, coffee culture, and the re-imagining of creative spaces.  KOKAYI considers himself an emcee and performer first; no matter the medium, he allows his love for the lexicon of artistic language to control the narrative of creating and his passion for the catharsis of performance to captivate his audiences across the globe. KOKAYI continues to act as a music producer and performer currently touring with his band as well as with Ambrose Akinmusire, Terri Lynne Carrington + Social Science, Whose Hat is This?, Ego Mondo, Nate Smith +Kinfolk, Quite Sane, Sanity,  and with MacArthur Fellow Dafnis Prieto, while also creating opportunities for art in technology as an Arts and Creative consultant co-designing the FUTURE|MONEY grant for the Interledger Foundation and fintech/tech companies in need of arts programming.

As a Recording Academy member, KOKAYI served as Governor, Vice-President, President, and Trustee of the Washington DC Chapter of NARAS, as well as Co-Chairing the National President's Committee and National Planning and Governance Committee, and serving as Board member of the National Producers and Engineers Committee and Awards and Nominations committees. An advocate for the indigenous music of DC, he also helped facilitate the addition of go-go as a genre for the Regional Roots category, allowing go-go music to be codified as a genre for the first time in Recording Academy history.  

“My work is an amalgamation of life experiences as filtered through DC, Go-Go, and the African/African American cultural influences created and passed on throughout the African diaspora.”