Savanna
"Sweetwater"
Morgan

Savanna “Sweetwater” Morgan is a multidisciplinary artist, scholar, and musical folklorist working across sound, performance, film, poetry, pedagogy, and archival research. Grounded in Black liberation praxis, her work approaches artistic practice as both a research method and a communal technology—one that studies, transmits, and repairs histories carried through the body, the voice, and the sonic.

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Raised in East Texas and working internationally between Berlin, the United States, and West Africa, Morgan engages the blues as an Afro-diasporic epistemology rather than a genre alone. Her practice understands music, rhythm, and vocality as containers capacious enough to hold the contradictions of Black life—joy and grief, intimacy and rupture, inheritance and refusal—where written text alone proves insufficient. Drawing from Black feminist thought, critical Black studies, and folk linguistic traditions, she works anti-disciplinarily, moving between research, performance, and publication without hierarchy.

Morgan holds an M.A. in Devised Theatre and Performance Practice, with a creative thesis titled Blues for Mrs., and is a research editor and performance-researcher with Archive Books and Archive Ensemble. Her anti-disciplinary lecture-performance Transbluesencies: a poetic you can see through investigates blues lyricism as a form of gendered disobedience and embodied knowledge, centering the voice as archive, protest, and spiritual technology.

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As a bandleader and lead composer, Morgan released her debut double-disc EP SWEETWATER, recorded with her five-piece ensemble The Lovers and produced by Rabih Beaini (Morphine Records). The project moves between jazz-inflected neo-soul and ambient improvisation, extending her research on blues consciousness into contemporary sonic form.

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Her publications include the poetry collection cow tripe (Hopscotch Editions; reprinted by Archive Books), contributions to Parabolis Virtualis (Querverlag), Togetherness (Archive Books), and critical writing on sound and poetics. Her work has been presented at institutions including Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Gropius Bau, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Savvy Contemporary, TanzFabrik, Villa Romana Florenz, and the Dak’Art Biennale. Her musical film Blues for Mrs., written and performed by Morgan, premiered in Berlin at Ballhaus Naunynstraße following international festival selections.

Across formats, Morgan’s practice cultivates spaces for listening, study, and collective reckoning within the Black diaspora—foregrounding memory, joy, intimacy, and healing as necessary modes of political and artistic life.