Featured Artist: Sofia Ribeiro
Sofia Ribeiro is a singer, composer, improviser and educator from Portugal. With a solid background in jazz studies, a deep connection to Portuguese traditional music and endless hours of listening to Brazilian legendary musicians, Sofia’s artistry challenges the boundaries of music labels. With ten albums as a leader, she has been performing intensively in Europe, South America and United States for the past 15 years. She won several international prizes, such as the first place at the vocal jazz competitions “Voicingers” (Poland) and the “Crest Jazz Vocal” (France), and the second place at Brussels “Young Jazz Singers” competition.
Sofia has a degree in ‘Jazz Performance’ from ESMAE (Portugal) and a master degree from the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. During her university studies, she did one-year exchange programs at ESMUC (Barcelona), Berklee College of Music (Boston) and 'Conservatoire National Superieur de Paris' (Paris), and graduated with ‘honors’. She completed two levels of the ‘Estill Voice Training Systems’ program and attended workshops and private lessons with Judy Niemack, Norma Winstone, Jeannie Lovetri, Maria Pia de Vito and Joey Blake, among many others. In 2002, she began studying vocal improvisation with Rhiannon. In 2014 she competed her “All the Way In” advanced program, and was selected to co-pilot that same course in 2017.
For the past years, Sofia has been teaching workshops and leading her own retreats of vocal improvisation all over Europe, the United States, and South America. She was one of the founding members of the European vocal ensemble PLAYground, and the New York based group The Whole Time, which created completely improvised performances. In 2019 she founded the “Vocal Being” project, which offers vocal improvisation retreats in Portugal, a collaboration with Portuguese improvisers Rizumik and Manuel Linhares.
Between 2015 and 2019 she lived in New York City, and worked as an artist in residence at the Carnegie Hall. For the past two years, she was part of the faculty at Bobby McFerrin’s Circle Songs course in Omega Institute. In 2019 she was a speaker at TEDx CESA (Colombia).
While teaching, performing and improvising, Sofia explores the endless potentiality of vocal improvisation as a way to transform yourself; a journey towards authenticity, vulnerability and deep connection to one another.
Be a Featured Artist!
In an effort to build a wonderful library of artists and teachers, we are now featuring artists who have completed All The Way In, Rhiannon's mastery-level course. If you have completed All The Way In, we are happy to feature you and your work! Just follow the submission instructions. We look forward to hearing from you!