Photo by John Parrotta
2024 projects
To Dream Again: Thoughts on Island Soundscapes and Environmentalism
The Paradise Industry: Law, Ecology, Media and the Making of Waikīkī Beach, 1890-1930 (in progress)
Author, Historian, Singer, Songwriter, and Multimedia Artist
Priya Parrotta
About
Priya Parrotta is an author, interdisciplinary historian, songwriter, singer, and multimedia artist dedicated to furthering environmental consciousness across borders. She is the Founder and Director of Music & the Earth International, an initiative which fosters ecological understanding, multicultural solidarity, and healing through research, writing, interdisciplinary programmes, live events, and original music. Her scholarly work draws from a diversity of fields, from cultural geography to political ecology to applied ethnomusicology. Her music, meanwhile, seeks to celebrate and restore the emotional, aesthetic and spiritual connections between humanity and the biosphere.
Priya believes firmly in the possibility of a world in which we are able traverse persistent boundaries, heal from historical injustice, and unite to protect the ecosystems we love. She is a global citizen who grew up in Puerto Rico and Washington, DC, with close ancestral and personal ties to India and Italy.
Priya wrote her first book, The Politics of Coexistence in the Atlantic World, when she was twenty-five years old; and her second, completed manuscript is titled To Dream Again: Island Environmentalism through Music. Her current research project is titled The Paradise Industry: Law, Ecology, Media and the Making of Waikīkī Beach. She has also written, recorded and produced three albums of original music dedicated to the small, the meek and the wise: the soul of our one, beautiful planet.
Priya was educated in History (Colonialism & Globalization) and Music at Brown University, and briefly studied as a postgrad at the University of Oxford's School of Geography and the Environment. She is now writing a doctoral dissertation in interdisciplinary environmental history at the University of Aberdeen. Priya has worked for a range of cultural, political and environmental institutions in Washington, DC, including the Smithsonian and the Red Cross. She has also worked as an organizer with GreenFaith, a global interfaith climate network, and was a Founding Leader of The Sanctuaries, the first multifaith arts collective in the US.