MUSE • Musicians United for Social Equity

Biography

Natalie Brown is a storyteller. Through music, theatre, and research, she seeks to amplify voices historically excluded from western narratives and use the arts as a means for social change.

As a composer and musician, Natalie works within the worlds of theatrical, contemporary, and classical music. Most recently, the Ensemble Connect at Carnegie Hall commissioned and premiered her chamber music piece insomni/black (March 2024). She is the composer of the opera adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (New York City Center and Yale University, 2022-present). Her first musical, Finding Eden, was written with Tyler King and selected as a finalist for the Off-Broadway Rave Theater Festival (2019-2021). Notable among her other experience, she was a 2020 Write Out Loud contest finalist, composes incidental music for live theatre, and has performed her original music at venues recently including New York’s 54 Below and New Haven’s Koffee?.

Committed to telling stories in all mediums, Natalie has written multiple short plays, from Slavery Play (written, directed, and performed in her first grade classroom) to short plays including in the back of the bus (2021) and burnt chicken (2023). In theatre, her other experience includes acting, producing, music directing, and music assisting. At school, she has studied playwriting under Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, libretto writing under Lisa Kron, instrumentation/orchestration/composition under Kathryn Alexander, and musical theater composition under mentor Jeanine Tesori. Recently, she was named a Yale University Swensen Scholar in the Arts for her work on new musical Gun and Powder (Paper Mill Playhouse, 2024).

Natalie’s work is grounded in cultivating an understanding of where we are, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going; thus, academic rigor and research are essential parts of her process. Natalie is currently pursuing her BA in African-American Studies and Music at Yale University (‘25). At Yale, she is a Mellon Mays/Edward A. Bouchet fellow, for which she researches the performance of race under the advisory of Dr. Daphne Brooks. Natalie is also a 2023-24 Gilder Lehrman College Fellow, and she recently studied Black British Theatre at the British American Drama Academy under playwright Oladipo Agboluaje (2023).

Raised in Houston, TX, she now splits her time between New Haven, CT, Boston, MA, and New York City.