Cécile McLorin Salvant

Cécile McLorin Salvant, is a composer, singer, and visual artist. The late Jessye Norman described her as “a unique voice supported by an intelligence and full-fledged musicality, which light up every note she sings.”

Salvant has developed a passion for storytelling and discovering connections between vaudeville, blues, theater, jazz, Baroque, and folkloric music. She is an eclectic curator, unearthing rarely recorded, forgotten songs with strong narratives, interesting power dynamics, unexpected twists, and humor.

Salvant won the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz International Jazz Vocal Competition in 2010. She received three consecutive Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album for The Window, Dreams and Daggers, and For One To Love, and was nominated for the award in 2014 for her album WomanChild.

In 2020, Salvant received the MacArthur fellowship and the Doris Duke Artist Award. Nonesuch Records released the twice Grammy-nominated Ghost Song in 2022, and in 2023 (again twice Grammy-nominated) the follow up, Mélusine, an album sung mostly in French, along with Occitan, English and Haitian Creole.

On September 19, 2025, Nonesuch released Oh Snap, comprised of 12 very personal songs composed and produced by Salvant. The album features longtime collaborators Sullivan Fortner, Yasushi Nakamura, and Kyle Poole, as well as cameos from singers June McDoom and Kate Davis. Salvant wrote these short, intimate songs as part of a creative quest: To place spontaneity and joy at the center of her writing process. She originally recorded them alone, at home, never intending for them to be released and using digital tools and effects—including GarageBand, Logic, AutoTune, Midi plugins, drum loops, vocal effects, reverb, and filters—that she had never played with before. The songs reflect Salvant’s wide-ranging musical influences from her 1990s childhood in Miami—from boy bands to grunge to classical to folk—and include party tracks with beats, samba grooves, and quiet folk songs.

Born and raised in Miami by her French mother and Haitian father, she started classical piano studies at age five, sang in a children’s choir at age eight, and took classical voice lessons as a teenager.

She received a bachelor’s degree in French law from the Université Pierre-Mendes France in Grenoble while also studying Baroque music and jazz in France at the Darius Milhaud Music Conservatory in Aix-en-Provence.

Salvant’s latest work, Ogresse—for which she wrote the story, lyrics, and music—is a musical fable in the form of a cantata that blends genres (folk, Baroque, jazz, country). It is arranged by Darcy James Argue for a 13-piece orchestra of multi-instrumentalists. Both a biomythography and an homage to the Erzulie (a powerful family of female loa [spirits/goddesses] in Haitian Vodou), as painted by Gerard Fortune and Sara Baartman, Ogresse explores fetishism, hunger, diaspora, cycles of appropriation, lies, othering, and ecology. The work is in development to become an animated feature-length film, which Salvant will direct.

Salvant also makes large-scale textile drawings. Her visual art can now be found at Picture Room in Brooklyn, New York.