Founder | Executive Director
Dr. Janie Cole (PhD University of London) is a Research Scholar at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music and Visiting Professor in Yale’s Department of Music, an Affiliate of the Yale Council on African Studies, Research Officer for East Africa on the University of the Witwatersrand and University of Cape Town’s interdisciplinary project Re-Centring AfroAsia (2018-), and a Research Associate at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (2022-). In 2024, she will join the University of Connecticut’s Department of Music as an assistant professor of musicology. Prior to this, she was a Senior Lecturer (adjunct) at the University of Cape Town’s South African College of Music for nine years (2015-23). Her research encompasses a broad range of subjects with a strong focus on interdisciplinarity, source studies and global music histories, including on music and the anti-apartheid struggle in 20th-century South Africa and musical constructions of Blackness, apartheid struggle movement politics, violence, resistance, trauma, and social change; musical practices, instruments and thought in early modern African kingdoms and Afro-Eurasian encounters, transcultural circulation and entanglements in the age of exploration; and the intersection of music, consumption and production, politics, patronage and gender in late Renaissance and early Baroque Italy and France. Her current work focuses on early modern musical culture at the royal court in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia and intertwined sonic histories of entanglement with the Latin Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean world. She is the author of two books, A Muse of Music in Early Baroque Florence: the Poetry of Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane (Olschki, 2007) and Music, Spectacle and Cultural Brokerage in Early Modern Italy: Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane, 2 vols. (Olschki, 2011), as well as numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters. She has been granted fellowships from The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti (2005-6), the Newberry Library (2008), the Medici Archive Project (2002-5), won research grants from The Getty Foundation (2007-9), The Leverhulme Trust (1996-98), and The Italian Cultural Institute (1995-96), and been awarded the Stephen Arlen Award from English National Opera (1995), the Janet Levy Prize from the American Musicological Society (2010), the Author Grant Award from the Academic and Non-Fiction Authors Association of South Africa (2015), and the Claude V. Palisca Fellowship Award in Musicology from the Renaissance Society of America (2020). She has worked at Christie’s New York as a junior specialist in the Books and Manuscripts Department (2000-01) and been invited to give guest lectures at New York University (2011-13), Syracuse University (2012), the International Studies Institute (2012) and Harvard University in Florence (2014), The Newberry Library (2008), Northwestern University (2008), University of Cape Town (2015), Dickinson College (2015), Indiana University Branigin Lecture (2017), Michigan State University (2017), Chicago University (2017), McGill University (2019), Toronto University (2019), Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University (2022), Stanford University Ron Alexander Memorial Lecture (2022), and she has presented research papers at numerous international conferences. Janie served as Council Member of the Renaissance Society of America as Discipline Representative in Music (2015-17) and is currently the founding Discipline Representative in Africana Studies (2018-23) at RSA and on the Editorial Advisory Board of Renaissance Quarterly. She is the co-founder of the international Study Group Early African Sound Worlds, the founder of the Kukutana Ensemble which develops musical performances rooted in indigenous East African music and its historical links to a pre-colonial Indian Ocean World sound- and visualscapes, with the premiere of Gabriel’s Odyssey (2021), and co-organized the landmark international conference on Music in Africa and its diffusion in the early modern world (1300-1650) at Tours University (2022). She is building the Malibongwe Women’s Archive of women’s struggle testimonies and music from apartheid prisons in collaboration with University of Cape Town Libraries Special Collections funded by the Schlettwein Foundation, and co-directing the film We Are Not Afraid: Music and Resistance in Apartheid Prisons, with South African filmmaker, Shameela Seedat (to be released 2024/25). Janie’s love of the African continent was ignited by a trip to Zimbabwe in the early 1990s as a volunteer to track numbers of the endangered black rhino in Hwange national park for an Earthwatch project. Her favourite pastime is swimming in the Great African seaforest with her 3 children.
Business Manager & Producer
Nancy enjoyed a career in the international petroleum industry holding senior positions with Sun Oil International and Morgan Stanley in the U.S. and London. She subsequently organized and led crisis management teams on behalf of European banks and their clients specializing in the reorganization of their core businesses. She has advised international companies and law firms on matters relating to arbitration, governance and board issues. She served on the board of directors of Transpetrol Maritime Services, and is godmother to the tanker “Affinity”. She was a consultant on Nancy Buirsky’s documentary film The Loving Story, and for many years a sponsor of The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, NC. Currently, Nancy is working together with start-up businesses and organizations, advising on their business plans, financing, management structure and staffing. She also does probono work in the field of the arts and humanities. She lives between Florence, Italy and the United States.