Artist in Residence, Stockholm 2 March 2026–24 May 2026

Alanna Stuart (aka PYNE) is a Caribbean-Canadian music artist-scholar, curator, and documentarian based in Toronto and Montreal, Canada. Stuart is presently in the thick of what she dubs a ‘Femmehall’ praxis: a feminine approach to dancehall reggae music production and performance. Stuart’s music praxis emerged from Canada’s 1970s immigration explosion—which brought Stuart’s Jamaican father and Grenadian mother to Canada.

As a sound, Femmehall is electronic-based music with heavy sub-bass and syncopated rhythms of 90’s dancehall, emotionally raw gospel and Feist-inspired vocals, and classic soul songwriting. Producing and performing as PYNE, Alanna dually honours Jamaica’s unruly production and the underground indie and bass scenes of Canada, stretching how far dancehall’s “anything goes – template” can reach.

As a research project, Femmehall is a music studio prototype, guided by dancehall music production studio practices and a Black feminist care ethic. In both music making and research, Alanna is motivated to play an agentive role in building her own new world of sound to reflect a diasporic present–layered, complex, and raw.

Alanna’s IASPIS residency is two-folds: to develop the design of her Femmehall music production studio prototype and to further expand her music production practice. During her stay, she will research architecture and cultural placemaking through readings, studio visits, learning care-based methods, and group conversations, guided by Swedish Black feminist architect and researcher Marie-Louise Richards.

She is also preparing the release of her debut solo record, To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before, a collection of “Jamaicanified” versions of songs by women who have influenced her: Kate Bush, Solange, St. Vincent, Casey Mecija, and Liz Fraser (of the Cocteau Twins).

Alanna Stuart is currently a PhD student in Gender Studies at Queen’s University, supervised by Black studies scholar Katherine McKittrick, and a recipient of a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. She holds a Master’s degree in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University.

In 2023, she was the inaugural artist-in-residence at the University of Toronto’s Afrosonic Innovation Lab. Her cultural industries research has been published in Socio-Economic Review, Work, Employment & Society, and tekhnē.

Recent performances include Women & Non-Binary Artists in Music & Tech (solo) at Lincoln Center, New York (2024), Unheard Freqs at PHI Foundation, Montreal (2024), and Lay Hold to the Softest Throat at Festival TransAmériques, Montreal. Exhibitions include Rewind/Forward at the Beyond Homophobia Conference, Kingston, Jamaica (2024), and ArtworxTO: Year of Public Art, Toronto (2022). Stuart has collaborated with artists such as Beverly Glenn Copeland, Bambii, U.S. Girls, Equiknoxx Music, Jeremy Dutcher, and Junior Boys, and has opened for Etta James, Feist, Tricky, The Bug, and Little Dragon.

@_alannastuart_
@pynesound