Angélique Kidjo

Genre defining. Era defining. Legendary. Choose your superlative. Angélique Kidjo embodies them all. Her magnetic stage presence, expressive, crystalline vocals, and infectious songs have kept music fans across the globe rapt for more than 35 years.

The Beninois-French singer-songwriter burst out of Paris and onto the international stage via her 1989 album Parakou, and rose to world music superstardom two years later with the Billboard World Albums chart-topping Logozo. She has continued over the decades that followed to stand among the most revered artists in world music, winning new fans along the way with astounding live performances and fifteen remarkable studio albums, including a critically acclaimed 2018 song-by-song reimagining of the Talking Heads’ landmark Remain In Light, and her most recent release, 2021’s award-winning Mother Nature.

Kidjo is a five-time Grammy winner in the Best Contemporary World Music Album and Best Global Music Album categories. She is Afropop’s most visible and popular artist. Time Magazine has called her “Africa’s premiere diva” and in 2021 included her in the Time 100 list of the world’s most influential people.

She is fluent in five languages — Fon, Gen, Yorùbá, French, and English — and sings in all of them, as well as in Swahili. She has served since 2002 as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and has campaigned for Oxfam and the International Federation of Human Rights’ Africa for Women’s Rights initiative. She is the founder of the Batonga Foundation which seeks to empower and educate adolescent girls in her native West Africa.

Share the excitement with us as we bring another living legend to our stage.

Funded in part by the New England States Touring program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Touring Program and the six New England state arts agencies