Grace Nono, Ph.D.

Biography

I’m Born and raised in northern and southern Agusan in Mindanao, Philippines to a Camiguingnon mother and an Ilocano father, Dr. Grace Nono is a scholar who writes at the intersections of ethnomusicology, Native religious studies, gender, and ecology. She is also a music performing artist who specializes in the performance of Philippine oral traditional songs, and the Founding Head of the Tao Foundation for Culture and Arts, a non-profit organization dedicated to cultural revitalization.

Grace received her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from New York University; her first masters in Philippine Studies from the University of the Philippines; and her second masters in Religion, major in Women, Gender and Sexuality/Comprehensive from Yale University. She has taught courses at the University of the Philippines Arts Studies Department, and at the Harvard Divinity School during a postdoc with the Women’s Studies in Religion Program. Grace has published Song of the Babaylan: Living Voices, Medicines, Spiritualities of Philippine Ritualist-Oralist-Healers (2013), The Shared Voice: Chanted and Spoken Narratives from the Philippines (2008), and a number of articles. Her third book is currently in press: Babaylan Sing Back: Philippine Shamans, Voice, Gender, and Place (2021).

As Founding Head of the Tao Foundation for Culture and Arts, Grace has organized transnational gatherings participated in by Philippine Native ritualists, oralists, healers, on the one hand, and by professional scholars, artists, and activists, on the other. The Tao Foundation also runs the Agusan del Sur-School of Living Traditions that facilitates the transmission of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices from Native elders to Native youth in a whole range of areas from language to songs and dances, to customary law, ancestral domain, ritual, and medicine. As a singer of Philippine oral traditional songs taught to her by various Philippine elders, Grace has been presented in over sixty cities and venues in over twenty countries in Asia, Europe and North America. For more information about Dr. Grace Nono please visit taofoundationph.org and gracenono.com.