The UVA Department of Music is pleased to present a colloquium with Dr. Jasmine Henry on Friday, March 13th at 3:30pm in Room 107 of Old Cabell Hall. This event is free to attend but has limited capacity due to classroom size.
Jasmine Henry (she/her) is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include Black electronic dance music, independent music production, and Afrofuturism. Her current book project focuses on the history of Black urban club music and party cultures in Newark, New Jersey and how contemporary participants navigate the transhistorical cultural politics of Black club music production and performance on local, regional, and global levels. Henry’s scholarly practices are deeply informed by her own music production background. As a live sound engineer, she has entertained international audiences through her work on critically acclaimed productions such as the Blue Man Group, HBO’s The Newsroom, and Broadway’s Chicago the Musical. From 2017 to 2022, she served as the Media Lab Director at the Newark School of the Arts, where she provided youth from historically marginalized backgrounds with access to music technologies and industry knowledge.
From Dr. Henry:
This talk examines the politics of independent Black feminist curatorial work in contemporary electronic dance music through the placemaking and performance practices of DJ UNIIQU3. Cherise Gary, widely known as the “Jersey Club Queen,” is a Newark-born producer and performer recognized for bold DJ sets and a sustained commitment to intersectional feminist interventions in nightlife. In 2019, she founded PBNJ, an annual block party series designed to connect the club music scenes of Newark, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Rotating among these cities, PBNJ brings together DJs, dancers, promoters, and fans, generating communal experiences that weave infrastructures and sustain the continuity of Black club culture.
Drawing on fieldwork at PBNJ events and online media, I theorize UNIIQU3’s curatorial practice as socio-sonic labor: the work of arranging how sound, bodies, and infrastructures converge in real time. These block parties and their digital circulations extend Black feminist thought, foregrounding care, relationality, and community work often overlooked in cultural histories of electronic music. Viewed through this lens, PBNJ demonstrates how Black women DJs assert authority within male-dominated nightlife scenes. By curating these events and mediating their presence online, UNIIQU3 shows how Black women transform club culture from within, enacting modes of belonging, authorship, and care that challenge the exclusions of the electronic dance music industry.
The Music Department Colloquium Series is free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted. Invited speakers have represented a broad range of backgrounds and interests; recently, we have enjoyed visits by Ann Cooper Albright, Milton Babbitt, Scott Burnham, Mark Butler, Suzanne Cusick, Walter Frisch, Kyle Gann, John Gibson, Katherine Hagedorn, Berthold Hoeckner, Melissa Hui, Elisabeth Le Guin, Susan McClary, Louise Meintjes, Roger Parker, Lara Pellegrinelli, Douglas Irving Repetto, Deidre Sklar, Robynn Stilwell, Troika Ranch (a digital dance theater company), Dan Trueman, Gayle Wald, Kendall Walton, James Webster, and Deborah Wong, among many others.