Rhiannon Giddens’ Biscuits & Banjos Foundation
Photo courtesy of Jeyhoun Allebaugh
The Biscuits & Banjos Foundation celebrates the African diaspora’s role in shaping American identity and culture through music, literature, food, and community.
GRAMMY & Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens developed the Biscuits & Banjos Foundation with a goal to envision a world where the full story of American music, literature, food, and culture is told, and where the communities that created it are resourced, visible, and thriving.
The Foundation curates programming that traces the Black origins of American music and culture back to the people and communities of the African diaspora, whose contributions have often been erased, exploited, or forgotten. Through concerts, community gatherings, educational projects, funding initiatives, and partnerships with artists and organizations across the country, the B&B Foundation creates spaces where audiences can engage with a more full and honest history of American culture, while taking meaningful action to support the communities it comes from.
The Biscuits & Banjos Foundation:
Invests directly in Black-led artistic programming, with a particular focus on traditions rooted in folk, old time, country, and roots music.
Curates and invests in cultural education and the work of mission-aligned artists and teachers through grants and sponsorships.
Produces and supports community engagement events that pair music with food, storytelling, and dialogue, creating experiences rooted in place and designed to strengthen connections between audiences and the communities around them.
Partners with organizations doing parallel work in cultural preservation.
Biscuits & Banjos was created to honor the 20th Anniversary of the Black Banjo Gathering – a landmark musical summit held in Boone, NC in 2005 that became the impetus behind the creation of GRAMMY-winning black string band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, which launched Rhiannon Giddens’s career. It was at this event where she met the legendary fiddler Joe Thompson, who passed along songs, musical traditions, and stories of his generation.
That gathering celebrated and underscored the vital contributions of Black voices in American roots music, something that has been the subject of persistent attempts at erasure. Combating that erasure has been the work central to Rhiannon’s career from the beginning, helping to honor and uplift the contributions of Black artists, storytellers, authors, and culture bearers.
For the twentieth anniversary of the Black Banjo Gathering, Rhiannon curated the Biscuits & Banjos Festival, a large-scale event in Durham, North Carolina. Over three days, thousands of people gathered to celebrate Black music, art, and culture through performances, workshops, jam sessions, culinary events, films, readings, square dances, and panels, with the centerpiece being the reunion of the Carolina Chocolate Drops for the first time in over a decade.
The spirit of this work continues with the Biscuits & Banjos Foundation.
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Unmanageable is Biscuits & Banjos Foundation’s nonprofit partner and fiscal sponsor, helping to provide strategic advising, operational support, partnership in financial oversight, and fundraising infrastructure. Unmanageable is a 501(c)3 charitable organization, based in Nashville, with a mission to mobilize resources and build power for artists engaged in social change work.
ABOUT RHIANNON GIDDENS
Rhiannon Giddens is the Founder of the Biscuits & Banjos Foundation, leading its programmatic vision.
A two-time GRAMMY Award-winning singer and multi-instrumentalist, MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, Pulitzer Prize winner, and composer of opera, ballet, and film, Giddens has centered her work around the mission of lifting up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been overlooked or erased, and advocating for a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins through art.
Giddens has released three albums under her own name and four in collaboration with Francesco Turrisi, the Silkroad Ensemble, and Justin Robinson, all on Nonesuch Records. The latter, her most recent album, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, released in April 2025.
A founding member of the landmark Black string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, and the all-female banjo supergroup, Our Native Daughters, Giddens is as much a curator as a creator. She is the current Artistic Director of the Yo-Yo Ma-founded Silkroad Ensemble, hosts a TV show on PBS, My Music with Rhiannon Giddens, and has hosted two podcasts (Aria Code from New York City’s NPR affiliate station WQXR, which ran for three seasons, and American Railroad from Silkroad). Giddens has published two children's books and written and performed music for the soundtrack of Red Dead Redemption II, one of the best-selling video games of all time. She was a music consultant for 2025’s landmark film Sinners, and appeared as a recurring cast member on ABC's hit drama Nashville and as a music history expert on Ken Burns’ Country Music series on PBS.
As Pitchfork once said, “few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration”—a journey that has led to NPR naming her one of its 25 Most Influential Women Musicians of the 21st Century and to American Songwriter calling her “one of the most important musical minds currently walking the planet.”