Internationally acclaimed singer and songwriter Amanda Pascali will perform a concert and have a live conversation with Univeristy of Texas scholars Luisa Nardini and Valerie McGuire. Pascali’s music blends folk/Americana influences with southern Italian and Latin rhythms. Pascali is the creator of "To Sing and to Recount," a digital storytelling project to translate and revitalize Southern Italian folk songs, including the work of Rosa Balistreri.
About the Artist
As the rising voice of America's most ethnically diverse generation of young people, 26-year-old Amanda Pascali writes songs that speak to the experience of growing up as a first-generation American. In 2023 her popularity exploded on social media following several viral videos of her song translations. Amanda’s music, now coined, Immigrant American Folk delivers a powerful narrative on being, “too foreign for here, too foreign for home, and never enough for both.”
The internationally acclaimed, bilingual singer/songwriter and 2021 Houston Chronicle "Musician of the Year," was born in Queens, New York, and is based between Houston, Texas and Palermo, Sicily. Amanda has released music and performed internationally, from the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. to the European Union Parliament in Brussels and across the globe. In 2023, endorsed by the US State Department and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a Fulbright Fellow, she pioneered the first comprehensive project to translate and revitalize Sicilian folk songs. The first single from her forthcoming project, a collection of folk songs and original compositions produced by country/folk singer, Robert Ellis, is slated for release this fall, 2024.
Blending folk/Americana influences with Mediterranean, Balkan, and Latin rhythms Pascali’s songs are powerful tales of America told through the eyes of immigrants and those who have always felt like the “other”. With a father who was thrown out of his home country for rebelling against the government and an immigrant mother who built a career from scratch in 1980s Brooklyn, Amanda was driven from a young age to be a messenger of her family’s stories and diaspora.