Dr. Samantha Ege is an author, pianist, and music historian. She is best known for her award-winning work on the African American composer Florence Price and critically acclaimed recordings of underrepresented composers.
Dr. Ege's first book South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene was hailed by BBC Music Magazine as “a powerful corrective to the ‘Great Man’ theory of history.” She regularly writes about African-descended composers, with bylines in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Statesman. Her BBC Radio 3 documentaries, "Florence Price's Chicago and the Black Female Fellowship" and "Undine Smith Moore: The Dean of Black Women Composers," also reflect the breadth of her broadcasting work.
She made her Barbican debut in 2021 with a "vivid, revelatory recital" (iNews) in which she gave the UK premiere of Vítězslava Kaprálová's Sonata Appassionata. She also gave the world premiere of Florence Price's complete Fantasie Nègre at the 2021 London Festival of American Music. She has performed across the UK, Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia. She has also played with orchestras such as the BBC Philharmonic, Oxford Philharmonic, Oakland Symphony, Arkansas Symphony, New Haven Symphony, and Yale Philharmonia.
On her most recent recording project, Dr. Ege performs as the soloist alongside the BBC Philharmonic and conductor John Andrews in the world-premiere recording of Avril Coleridge-Taylor's Piano Concerto (out on Resonus Classics this November). She is presently working on another collaboration with John Andrews and the BBC Concert Orchestra for a recording of British piano concertos, featuring world premieres and new commissions.
As a musicologist, Dr. Ege has won several distinctions including the 2021 American Musicological Society's Noah Greenberg Award and 2023 Society for American Music's Irving Lowens Article Award. She has held research positions at the University of Southampton and was previously the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. In 2024, she was a Rose Library Visiting Research Fellow in the area of African American History and Culture at Emory University, and in 2019 received both a Society for American Music Eileen Southern Fellowship and a Newberry Library Short-Term Fellowship.
Dr. Ege holds a PhD in Musicology (York) and a BA (hons) in Music (Bristol). She spent her second undergraduate year at McGill as an exchange student.
Ege is pronounced Eh-geh (ɛgɛ)
