Campus Directory

Pronouns she/ her

Division Arts Division

Department/ College/ Unit Music Department

Title Assistant Professor of Music

Affiliation Faculty

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Primary Office Location Music Center
RM 150

Mail Stop Music Center

Biography, Education and Training

 

akua naru is a hip hop artist, poet, producer, theater maker, and Assistant Professor of Hip Hop at UC Santa Cruz. Her music, live hip hop, travels the vast Black American music continuum, centering language as its animating force. She has released multiple critically acclaimed albums, toured extensively internationally, and built a devoted global following. Rooted in Black feminism and diasporic consciousness, her work theorizes hip hop as a site of undoing, testimony, and past/future-making.
She is the founder of The Keeper, the first archive to document and preserve women’s work throughout 50+ years of hip hop, permanently housed at Brown University. She has been a fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Brown University, and Yale. Her collaborations span musical worlds, including Questlove, Eric Benet, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Angélique Kidjo, and master drummers Bernard Purdie and Tony Allen. Her current work, Longing To Tell—a libretto she wrote and performs, adapted from Dr. Tricia Rose’s groundbreaking book of the same name and composed by MacArthur and Pulitzer Prize winner Tyshawn Sorey, performed with German classical orchestra Ensemble Resonanz—premiered in August 2025 in Hamburg, Germany. In praise of her work, public intellectual and scholar Dr. Cornel West named her the “Toni Morrison of hip-hop.” She is the founding director of the UCSC Hip Hop LAB.