Renee Benson is a New Orleans based singer, songwriter, poet and composer from New York. As a singer (jazz, hip hop, soul, funk, gospel, reggae and more), she has performed  in Germany, Austria, Turkey, UK, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Holland, Denmark and Romania.Last year, she had a blast performing at the Glastonbury Music Festival in the UK.  She won 3rd place at the Roux Carre Talent Search "Battle of the Bands" held at the New Orleans House of Blues.  In 2011, she performed as part of the Austrian entry for Eurovision LifeBall in Vienna, and Glastonbury in 2017. Renee is the lead voice for the experimental jazz and hip hop collective, "No Home For Johnny," labeled as the highlight of the 2015 Popfest festival in Vienna. She teaches songwriting, voice and experimental vocal sound around the world with a number of institutions including: Girls Rock (Austria),Young Audiences, BANFF, Hamilton Education Program through Gilder Lehrman Institute and built an arts intensive program in the South Bronx for young women called IN MY WORDS https://newsettlement.org/inmywords. Renee has taught summer residencies at a music camp at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) and will be in residency at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans this September, working on “Requiem for a Stranger” with Vagabond Inventions. Renee wrote the book, scored by the up and coming Austrian Composer Vincent Pongracz, for “Leelah” https://www.lee-lah.com/ performed by the Vogelberg Jazz Orchestra.

Over the past 10 years, she has split her time between New York and Europe — spending the bulk of that time writing and performing in Vienna.  She studied vocal performance with Meredith Monk Ensemble and under Ariel Bybee, a prominent mezzo-soprano at the Metropolitan Opera for eighteen seasons as well as creative writing with Kenyan writer N’gugi wa Thiong’o, author of “Decolonizing the Mind.”  Renee holds a bachelor of fine arts (BFA) at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.