2024-25 Grant Wood Fellow of Interdisciplinary Performance Lyndsey Scott is a multimedia artist, songleader, songwriter, and ritualist committed to exploring community singing as a technology of belonging and a strategy for mutual liberation. 

Her initial studies in visual art focused on painting and she graduated with a BFA from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. She applied her studies in St. Louis, MO as a Community Art Training Fellow where she explored participatory art, photography, interactive performance, and parades as catalysts for collective effervescence in sites as varied as basement shows, the St. Louis Art Museum, The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, street corners, caves, and public schools. Her reputation for playful + potent engagement earned recognition including the Grand Center Visionary Artist Award, Critical Mass for the Arts Stimulus, and the 52nd City Kick Ass Award.

After a decade of work in community art, Lyndsey became curious about what practices can support group transformation at an even deeper level.  She studied yoga at Kripalu Institute and permaculture at Earthaven EcoVillage and the Possibility Alliance, and then moved back to her rural Illinois hometown to apply these inquiries. She founded a small trauma-informed yoga studio, hosted affinity groups for racial healing, facilitated a garden project for formerly incarcerated men, taught art at a juvenile detention center, and instigated month-long bike service treks with “The Biking Superheroes.”  Along this healing journey, she discovered the power of collective singing.  She apprenticed with mentors Liz Rog, Lisa G. Littlebird, Laurence Cole, and Holistic Resistance to develop mastery in songleading, ritual craft, circle work, and grief tending. 

Lyndsey composes and records mindful mantra music with a beat for the national and international community singing movement, including the albums Well Held (2022) and prodigal daughter (2024).  She collaborated with incarcerated musician Tony Rhodd to write Over/Under (2023), a powerful anthem for prison abolition. Her love song for the unknown, The Way Knows, is sung by thousands of people worldwide around campfires and conference tables alike. 

She currently co-facilitates the yearlong cohort of emergent earth-based ceremonial study with Earthkeeper Wisdom School in Hartsburg, MO and leads song for politicized somatics practitioners in Embodying Racial Justice’s yearlong program, Opening to Freedom in Millerton, NY.