Indigenous Composer Brent Michael Davids Among the 2025 SHIFT Awardees in Support of White Snake Project’s Premiere of his Requiem for America Opera

Boston, MA (For Immediate Release) — Today, the Native Arts Cultures Foundation (NACF) announced the 2025 SHIFT – Transformative Change Indigenous Arts awardees. These six Native artists, curators, and cultural practitioners were selected for their projects' potential to leverage creativity for the greater good. Composer Brent Michael Davids was selected for his forthcoming opera Requiem for America commissioned by WhIte Snake Projects and the Lenape Center and to be premiered by the company in Boston in 2026.        

Davids’s SHIFT Project, Requiem for America, addresses healing, systemic change, and reclaiming truth from sanitized histories. The project confronts the genocidal founding of America to give voice to America’s Indigenous People. The work exposes a specific genocide in each state, juxtaposing genocidal texts and stories from America’s founding with historical letters from American Indians. In addition to the Western singers and orchestra, each performance will feature Indigenous singers recruited from local tribal communities. Their vision is to tour every state in the country. White Snake Projects will premiere Requiem in Boston in 2026, during America’s 250th Anniversary, and will include a suite of community programs developed with lead partner organization, the North American Indian Center of Boston.,

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Native Arts Cultures Foundation SHIFT Awards

NACF’s SHIFT – Transformative Change Indigenous Arts program empowers artists, curators, and community collaborators to address social change issues through a Native lens. The program supports innovative community-driven projects created in partnership with an organization that uplifts Native communities, promote self-determination, and drive transformative change, paving the way for a resilient and thriving Indigenous future.

The SHIFT award provides multi-year support, including a $100,000 award over two years, as well as professional development, project evaluation, and marketing support. This comprehensive framework enables artists, collectives, and curators to develop impactful projects that engage broader audiences, while deepening their practice, fostering collaboration, and inspiring transformative dialogue on both national and global issues.

Awardees come from across the country and work in a variety of disciplines. NACF received a record number of applications, making this their most competitive open call for SHIFT awards. Applications were reviewed by a panel of Native artists and arts professionals.

About Brent Michael Davids

Brent Michael Davids is an internationally celebrated Indigenous composer, educator, and music scholar whose career spans nearly five decades. He is the co-director of the Lenape Center in Manhattan and co-founder of the Native American Composer Apprentice Project, championing Indigenous youth to compose written music. Davids is a recipient of a 2013 NACF National Artist Fellowship and has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), and The Rockefeller Foundation, among several others. His compositions have been performed by major symphonies and ensembles worldwide, from Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center to international stages across Europe and Asia. He has scored numerous films and been featured on national networks such as PBS, NPR, and National Geographic.

Davids’ compositions are known for their colorful orchestral textures and often feature traditional Native American instruments alongside innovative instruments of his own design, such as a soprano quartz crystal flute, a bass quartz crystal flute, and air or water-based percussion instruments that chirp and whistle. He has also created bowl-shaped devices and resonating drums that can be bowed, shaken, or tapped. In addition to sound, David crafts ink manuscripts of his compositions that are visual works of art in their own right. He is a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community and currently lives in Wisconsin.

About White Snake Projects

White Snake Projects (WSP) is an activist performance company making mission-driven work that unites artmaking with civic practice. Celebrated for creating diverse, timely and relevant opera-theater, it envisions a world where the power of music expands our collective understanding of community and transforms lives through creative storytelling. The company programs thematically. Its most recent themes have been “voting rights” (2024) anchored by Is This America?, the story of Fannie Lou Hamer; and “climate” (2025) anchored by White Raven, Black Dove. A critical element in the exploration of these themes is the establishment of authentic connections with thought leaders in social justice to ensure that the company’s creative work lives in an ecosystem of activism. WSP sees opera not just as performance, but as performance with purpose, a vibrant and vital art form that is also a champion of change. WhiteSnakeProjects.org

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