VIRTUAL EVENT! Speaker Sessions: Dena Ross Jennings on Making Music and Instruments

Join us on Tuesday, January 21 for our Speaker Session with musician and luthier Dena Ross Jennings as she shares how she creates community through music, including the instruments she builds and her Affrolachian On-Time Music Gathering, also known as “The Thang.”

Dena Jennings is a physician and artist in Central Virginia who can trace her ancestry in Appalachia back five generations through her mother’s family. Twenty years after establishing her medical practice and ImaniWorks, a non-profit organization for conflict transformation and human rights advocacy, Jennings moved to Ontario, Canada, where she entered a four-year arts apprenticeship. There, she learned to hand carve modern instruments made from gourds and other natural fibers in the style of traditional instruments from around the world. At the end of her apprenticeship, she opened a workshop, studio, and retail music store in a small town in Central Ontario.

Upon meeting her husband who had developed an herb farm and retreat center in Central Virginia, she relocated the workshop and studio where she could grow her own gourds and mill her own wood. She re-opened her practice in Orange and its waiting room is a gallery for her sculpted instruments and a listening room for Appalachian and Black American roots music. Through ImaniWorks, Jennings conducts instrument building workshops, conflict transformation retreats, and hosts the Affrolachian On-Time Music Gathering at the farm. She also makes sculptures and performs Appalachian and folk Bengali music on gourd instruments. Jennings is the Vice Chair of the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and she has served as a commissioner since 2019. As she explains, she “endeavors to build the Beloved Community through my devotion to music, culture, and social justice.”