Thomas Stanley

About the Artist

Thomas Stanley lives a short distance from the Chesapeake Bay where he is co-parenting two school-aged sons. As an artist, author, and activist deeply committed to  audio culture in the service of personal growth and noetic (r)evolution, Stanley has performed and curated musical sound for most of his adult life. In August of 2022, he gave the keynote address at Cube Fest, a celebration of highly-spatialized music held in the advanced HDLA facilities of Virginia Tech’s Moss Arts Center. In April, 2022 he was a workshop presenter at the Prime Meridian Unconference convened by Black Quantum Futurism at the New School’s Vera List Center. From 2008-2022, Dr. Stanley hosted Bushmeat's Jam Session, a weekly FM music show, arguably the world’s first and only blackadelic radio program.   Stanley is the author of The Execution of Sun Ra (Wasteland Press, 2014), a critical response to the cosmic prognostications of the Birmingham-born iconoclast. Dr. Stanley has spent three  decades exploring the ramifications of Alter Destiny, Sun Ra’s unique construct for something like a planet-redeeming AfroFuture. He has written and lectured extensively on emergent  musical cultures and their connection to struggles for social justice and psychosocial liberation. He is co-author of George Clinton and P-Funk: An Oral History (1998). His doctoral work at the University of Maryland (2009) examined Butch Morris’s Conduction method as an extended meta-instrument offering unique opportunities for musical pedagogy and ensemble consciousness. Dr. Stanley is currently an associate professor of Sound Art, Sound Studies, and Consciousness at George Mason University.