A global practitioner of sound, language, and Black Atlantic thought, Lynnée Denise is an Amsterdam-based writer and interdisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, California. Shaped by her parent’s record collection and the 1980s, Denise’s work traces and foregrounds the intimacies of underground nightclub movements, music migration, and bass culture in the African Diaspora. She coined the term DJ Scholarship in 2013, which explores how knowledge is gathered, interpreted, and produced through a conceptual and theoretical framework, shifting the role of the DJ from a party purveyor to an archivist and cultural worker. 

Denise is at the helm of many groundbreaking artistic and academic productions, including After the Last Dance, the first and only Michael Jackson conference with The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The School of Prince with the Los Angeles Public Library, and Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace: From Detroit to Watts: the first conference dedicated solely to the musical life of The Queen of Soul with the UCLA African American Studies Department.  

A doctoral student in the Department of Visual Culture at the Goldsmiths University of London, Denise’s research contends with how iterations of sound system culture construct a living archive and refuge for a Black queer diaspora.

Her forthcoming debut book, Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters (the University of Texas Press), is a narrative journey of reclamation that intricately details and humanizes the full life, musical contributions, and cultural impact of Willie Mae Thornton. Written from the heart, ear, and research of a DJ scholar, this mixtape approach to Willie Mae’s biography as one of the most prominent Black women musicians/songwriters in music history composes, archives, and threads together the known, the politically erased, and the intimately discovered pieces of her life and prominence. The first biography to be published about her in the United States, Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters, will be released this September 2023.