Sweet Corey-Bey

Sweet Corey-Bey, is a Black transgender, multi-hyphenate musical practitioner and cultural organizer and based in Philadelphia, PA by way of gorgeous Prince George’s County Maryland. They are a currently an artist in residence at the University of the Arts Inspiration Lab. Sweet Corey-Bey is a founding member and leader of the gender and genre bending artist collective Black Folks Don’t Swim?

Sweet Corey-Bey's art practice as an instrumentalist, composer, arranger and storyteller employs the ancestral mediums of jazz and blues as tools for shifting culture. The music they're making is building the social fabric of a world I want to be a part of and create for my people.

My relationship to this work is contextualized by the many Black Transgender musical performers who have come before them (they am here because my ancestors were…Gladys Bentley, Bessie Smith, Jackie Shane, Ma Rainey, Wilmer Broadnax and more!). Historically, our work as performers holds spaces for Black Queer and Gender Expansive folks to be and become. Music creates spaces of visibility and self determination for trans artists (myself included). These spaces are at the center of LGBQA social movements and progress towards better futures.