Jonah Francese

Jonah Francese is a community organizer, trumpet player, composer, and sometimes an academic. He received his B.A. in both trumpet performance and jazz composition from Berklee College of Music, his M.A. in jazz composition from the New England Conservatory, a second M.A. in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago, and finally his PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago.

Innovative Course Design Award, 2026, Chicago College of the Performing Arts, Roosevelt University.

Mike-Bidtah, Christopher, and Jonah Francese. Forthcoming. “‘Don’t Drink the Water’: Ecological Grief and Atomic Memory as Sites of Intergenerational Healing through Native Hip Hop.” MUSICultures.

Francese, Jonah. Forthcoming. “Moti: Movimiento, Diaspora, and Reconnecting Across Borders.” In Sadeghi-Yekta, Kirsten et al eds. Routledge Companion to Language Reawakening through the Arts.

Farrell, Natalie, and Jonah Francese. Forthcoming. “British Advisory: Irish Language [Sounding Loss Through Kneecap's Decolonial Hibernian Hip Hop].” In Sparling, Heather, and Andrea Shaheen Espinosa eds. ReSounding Loss: Music, Grief, and Culture (Oxford University Press Handbook).

Francese, Jonah, and Rachel Chery. “‘Baile Donde Quieras’: The Global Politics of Black Dance in Football,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/01937235261435607.

Francese, Jonah. “‘Red Future’: Native Hip Hop Bundles, Native Futurities, and the Native Technosphere.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 21 (2): 227–235. https://doi.org/10.1177/11771801251334139.

Francese, Jonah. “Language Revitalization through Indigenous Mexican Hip Hop: Building Towards an Indigenous Hip Hop Futurism.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 45 (1): 9–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2022.2143510.

My name is Jonah and my relations are of the Otomí Hñähñu People from Juxmaye, what is now known as the Mezquital Valley in México. I deeply believe that artistic practices and research are forms of kinship. My research and teaching place Native feminist knowledge productions in conversation with ethnographic approaches to art, sound, and performance. Place- and land-based pedagogies inform the way I and my students engage with performance as critical, active members of the spaces we inhabit. I aim to bring community members, especially those who have been systemically excluded, into reciprocal dialogue with the academy to recenter the People and the land in our shared intellectual work. Through my community building, I have fostered meaningful relationships with artists and have collaborated with them on a Native hip hop EP. As a musician and composer, I have gotten to tour México through the Fulbright-García Robles, as well as open for Salt-N-Pepa with a hip hop group that I co-founded. I also run a big band called Thinkin' Big which has toured internationally.

My research explores multiple facets of decolonial and digital pedagogies, Black/Native solidarities, ecological practices, decarcerality, Native language revitalization, and art as futurities. As a Native scholar, I am always rooted in creation stories. Knowledge is passed down through music and my work attends to the ways in which music creates intergenerational dialogues between ancestors, us, and future generations alike. My current book project builds on my dissertation, “‘We the New Ancestors’: The Passing of Native Hip Hop Bundles through Space and Time,” to argue that Native hip hop is kin, representing ancient ways of storytelling and oral tradition.

As a community organizer in Chicago, I have worked at the Pilsen Arts and Community House, the American Indian Association of Illinois, and for the Nights Out in the Park initiative at the Chicago Park District. Additionally, my community work encompasses a language revitalization initiative situated in the northern territories of Canada through the Phillips Fund for Native American Research Grant by the American Philosophical Society, where I collaborated to foster the use of Inuit languages. Continuing to break down the barrier between academic and community spaces is imperative for me. As artists, we can move more fluidly between these and it's our responsibility to facilitate this work.