Candice Hoyes is an artist of "chill-inducing range" (Vogue) across genre, medium, and style. In 2024, after years of performing there as vocal soloist, she made a second Lincoln Center debut as composer in Sadah Espii Proctor’s adrift, the first augmented reality installation in the Social Sculptures Project, a series of public art exhibitions. Upcoming debuts in 2024-25 season include The Kennedy Center, Morgan Library and Museum, Pioneer Works curated by Moor Mother, Blacktronika Festival, Public Records, unerhört! Festival, Harlem Chamber Players, The Shed and the Center for Performance Research.
Candice is noted in Carnegie Hall's Timeline of African American Music because "her scholarship on such luminaries of African American cultural history represents a noticeable departure from the usual practice of isolating creativity and critical analysis, and the textures of her sound exemplify Afrofuturism as well." Currently, she is a MAP Fund recipient. Candice has been awarded fellowships by NYSCA, Manhattan Arts grants, the Woodshed Network for Women in Jazz Fellowship, NYC Women's Fund and Harvard University's Fitzie Prize.
Born to Jamaican parents, she is a soprano, producer, songwriter, filmmaker, and archivist mutually steeped in exploring the untold stories of her heritage. She began composing for her voice and band after her start as an award-winning soprano (First Place, International Paul Robeson Opera Competition). Candice has collaborated with Chaka Khan, Jessye Norman, Wynton Marsalis, and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Theaster Gates, Phillip Glass, Natasha Diggs, Makaya McCraven, Lalah Hathaway, and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Her song "Zora's Moon" is the theme song of Truth Be Told, the podcast created/hosted by Tonya Mosley of NPR's Fresh Air. Candice is a fine arts model in painter Amy Sherald's 2022 internation exhibit "The World We Make" at Hauser & Wirth London. Candice's research and recordings of Duke Ellington are cited alongside Ella Fitzgerald in Vaughn A. Booker's Lift Every Voice and Swing Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Center, winner of the 2022 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities.
Candice's recent performances include Carnegie Hall, Detroit Symphony, Springfield Symphony (OH), Jazz at Lincoln Center, Caramoor, NYC JazzFest, and Blue Note.
As an organizer, Candice collaborates with the Feminist Press, Well-Read Black Girl, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in Law, Harlem Arts Alliance, Women in Music, and numerous grassroots organizations. She has produced her feminist performance lecture series for Jazz at Lincoln Center and CUNY for three consecutive seasons. Candice has been published by Shondaland, Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and spoken and performed at TED HQ. She is an honors graduate of Harvard University where she co-produced the first hip-hop conference, Columbia Law School, and a lecturer at Jazz at Lincoln Center. "Nite Bjuti" (pronounced night beauty) is her 2023 experimental jazz album, which the BBC dubbed "one of the most original and exciting I've hear this year."