Mali Obomsawin
PROJECTS:
Mali Obomsawin is a performer, composer, and improviser. Her work explores fringes and frontiers, influenced by her experience as a W8banaki person crossed by the US-Canada border. She is best known for her evocative singing, compositional storytelling and bass playing in her experimental ensembles and her band Deerlady. She is a citizen of Abenaki Nation at Odanak.
Mali also works in film as a composer, writer and actress. Her music was featured in the FX series Reservation Dogs in 2023. She composed the score for the Oscar-nominated documentary Sugarcane (2025) directed by Julian Brave Noisecat and Emily Kassie, and scored, wrote and narrated Lokotah Sanborn’s experimental doc Otherworld (2025). She has collaborated with musicians Raven Chacon, esperanza spalding, Yo-Yo Ma, Taylor Ho Bynum, and visual artist Cannupa Hanska Luger in recent years.
PRESS:
“Obomsawin reminds listeners constantly that folk music shouldn’t be about pliant, pretty subservience, and that Abenaki culture is loudly, proudly living and expanding.”
The Guardian
“The most auspicious album I heard this year”
Larry Blumenfeld, NPR
“A breath of fresh air…It not only works as a potent commentary on Indigenous heritage, autonomy and experiences, but as gripping, dynamic, and thunderous music in and of itself. All that without an ounce of overshowing.”
JazzTimes
“Obomsawin aims to shine a light on the largely hidden history of Indigenous jazz”
WNYC
“One of those albums that utterly defy expectation or convention - it occupies its own universe, arriving from leftfield to blow your mind.”
Folk Radio UK
