BOOMscat’s BIO:
The Peace & Body Roll Duo BOOMscat, affectionately known as BOOMscat, is a duo based in Washington, DC that consists of multi-hyphenate artists, Asha Santee (BOOMCLAK), and Jennifer Patience Rowe (Patience Sings). Together, they create a sound that ignites vulnerability, elevation and self-reflection. Since their conception in 2012, BOOMscat has released four studio projects including the No Life Jacket EP (2015) which reached #18 on the iTunes Top R&B Albums and Kinetic, (2018), their first full length-album which debuted at #6 on the itunes R&B charts and #94 on the iTunes Global Charts.
BOOMscat has performed at many venues across the United States, including the historic National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, DC), The Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage (Washington, DC), National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, DC), the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, MA) and the South by Southwest Conference and Festival (SXSW) in Austin, TX. In 2017, BOOMscat was chosen to perform on DC’s largest activation at the digital art festival, alongside - Ari Lennox, Wu-Tang Clan, Erykah Badu and Rare Essence.
BOOMscat’s music has been featured in several web-series and critically-acclaimed short films, like Suitable (2017, HBO) and Tender (2020, STARZ). Most recently BOOMscat completed their first joint film score, with Abundance (2021), showing at the 2021 BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia, PA.
ASHA’S BIO:
In one box she drew an astronaut. Another, a scientist. The last, an artist. Who knew that a kindergartner’s dream would later be her reality. Asha “BOOMCLAK” Santee was born with a beat in her heart and has been rocking to it ever since. Following in the footsteps of her father, who played the drums for their local church, Asha started playing at the age of 6. The entrepreneurial bug bit her early and at 14 she was teaching drums to kids in her neighborhood.
After a successful high school basketball career, she received a full scholarship to play for the illustrious Howard University where she studied Audio Production. By day, Asha was an athlete, but after practice, she would return to her dorm room to teach herself to play the piano and to produce music. In an attempt to add some cool music t-shirts to her closet, she caught the train to the mall and to her surprise, her college budget could not afford her desires. She returned home with a $5 blank tee from Old Navy with dreams of painting for the first time and a musical design. In April 2007, her Junior year of college, Note 2 Self was born after her shirt caught the eyes of her teammates and campus.
In pursuit of a professional basketball career after college, a broken leg injury would put her through two months of bed rest and there, she would find clarity in her musical gifts. In 2017, she relaunched Note 2 Self with a refreshed approach to design, music, and community. Her affiliate program Bangin’ with BOOMCLAK offers affordable private and group drum lessons to kids and adults of all ages and provides a beat making program to black girls battling depression. Asha also launched The BootyHearts Art Gallery which is a growing 150 piece collection of original work inspired by music, relationships, and love. Recently, the gallery started the Equal WALLportunity Act which provides free art to homes in need during the COVID-19 quarantine.
Asha Santee’s passion for music and art have taken her all over the world as she has been an asset to several bands across the DMV such as The Peace & Body Roll Duo BOOMscat, The CooLots, The Huda Asfour Trio, Grammy Nominee Carolyn Malachi, and Grammy Award Winning, Mya. Asha currently has three solo projects on all streaming platforms including her latest release, GINKGO. It is by far no mistake that she is not in outer space collecting moon samples or in a lab mixing potions for the next beauty elixir. The vision was written and plain. Today, Asha Santee is an artist. Simple. Powerful. Inspiring. True.
PATIENCE’S BIO:
Jennifer “Patience Sings” Rowe (she/they) is a non-binary, Nigerian-American, Fat, Black Femme and Cultural Worker, healing practitioner and educator. Patience, a native of Washington, DC hails from a family of multidisciplinary artists and DC Public School educators who have shaped her into the radical creative she is today.
Patience began professionally writing and performing poetry as a high school sophomore in Washington, DC where she would frequent open mics throughout her beloved hometown. While studying Radio Production at Columbia College Chicago, Patience spent much of her time acting in the theater department and performing poetry whenever she was called upon. During her time at Columbia College, she was given the opportunity to learn from and share her work alongside several activists and artists, such as Angela Davis, Nikki Giovanni, Sharon Bridgforth, La Pocha Nostra, and several other notable cultural workers and politicized artists.
Upon Patience’s return home in 2012, she was introduced to Asha Santee, where together they formed a band, affectionately known as BOOMscat. BOOMscat has released five studio projects, and one live mixtape. They have performed on countless stages, prestigious venues and academic institutions, have been featured in National media outlets and have gained critical traction as esteemed musicians across the United States.
Patience is currently the Director of Programs for the artist collective, Black in Space formerly known as Makers Lab (Washington, DC). Black in Space is an intergalactic organization creating physical and virtual spaces for Black LGBTQ+ people to find kinship through art and celebration. She is a founding board Member and collaborative artist for The Earth Pearl Collective (Seattle, WA). Patience is the recipient of a D.C. Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs 2019 40 Under 40: Queer Women of Washington award, and a 2020 Cultural Work Fellow with the Highlander Research and Education Center (New Market, TN). Patience is in her second year as a full-time educator, teaching Technology, Media, and Enrichment at Perry Street Preparatory Public Charter School in Washington, DC.
Patience’s passions are not limited to creating art or her newfound love of teaching. She is a champion for Black and Brown babies and their mental well health, she is an advocate for the representation and uplifting of Black Queer Fat Femmes, and a proponent for counseling through grief and greater mental health resources for Black and Brown folks everywhere. Patience is an artist of the healing tradition - a creative with an agenda and a warrior in the fight for the liberation of all her people. Her endgame is to have worked tirelessly to see every weapon formed against us dismantled - and to have every ear that has heard her voice, be made whole and be made free.
Allie Martin, residency curator
Dr. Allie Martin is a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Dartmouth College in the Music Department and the Cluster for Digital Humanities and Social Engagement. Her work explores the relationships between race, sound, and gentrification in Washington, DC. Utilizing a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and digital humanities methodologies, Allie considers how African-American people in the city experience gentrification as a sonic, racialized process. She is currently working on her first book, tentatively entitled Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC.
Ayanna Long, filmmaker
Ayanna Long is a filmmaker based in Washington, D.C. She studied at St. John’s University, where she holds a B.A. in Journalism. Ayanna's first documentary project, The Let Out, traces collective memories of DMV natives to tell the story of the cultural role that go-go music plays in the D.C.'s changing landscape. Her work has screened at The Anacostia Arts Center, The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in Brooklyn, NY and been on view at the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities’ I Street Galleries as part of the 2018 We Got Next exhibition.
