Mariana S. Vieira

Academic Year 2026-2027
Nasir Jones Hip Hop Fellow
Mariana S. Vieira looking away from the photographer in a black-and-white photograph

Mariana S. Vieira, known to the world as Ladybug Mecca, is a Grammy Award-winning artist, lyricist, and cultural force whose voice has moved through hip hop for more than three decades. As a founding member of the legendary Digable Planets, she helped open new dimensions in rap, blending jazz, poetic consciousness, diasporic rhythm, and feminist vision into music that still echoes across generations. From global stages to boundary-crossing collaborations, her work continues to honor music as memory, movement, and transformation.

Sounding Black Brazil: Rhythm, Language, and the Politics of Hip Hop

Mariana S. Vieira’s fellowship project is Sounding Black Brazil: Rhythm, Language, and the Politics of Hip Hop . It is an experimental sonic documentary and book project that explores Brazilian hip hop as a living archive of Black diasporic memory, political imagination, and cultural continuity. Rooted in the belief that rhythm is both memory and method, the project traces hip hop’s development in Brazil not as a foreign import, but as part of a deeper continuum of Afro-Brazilian traditions such as Candomblé drumming, samba, and capoeira — forms that have long carried Black life and expression through sound. Blending oral history, archival research, sonic analysis, and personal narrative, the places Brazilian hip hop within the wider Black Atlantic while centering sound itself as a vital force of knowledge, resistance, and cultural memory.