Abigail Washburn
Abigail Washburn is an old-time banjo player, singer, songwriter, and cross-cultural performer of folk music in both English and Mandarin Chinese, but more importantly, she is the mother of a Sunflower student, Theodore Fleck, and a third grader, Juno Fleck. Abigail & her partner, Béla Fleck, have toured the world separately and as a duo with their two kids in tow, navigating cities with both jet lag and excitement, playing hide-and-seek in theaters and clubs and converting hotel rooms into bouncy house bear caves.
Throughout her twenty-year career as musician and performer, Abigail has toured mainland China more than a dozen times, independently and with the support of the US State Department, including a tour of Tibet and a monthlong tour of The Silk Road from Hohhot to Urumqi. Her music offerings include records with partner Béla Fleck, all g’earl band Uncle Earl, The Sparrow Quartet, Yo-Yo Ma & The Silk Road Ensemble, The Shanghai Restoration Project, Tucker Martine & Kai Welch, and most recently with Guzheng virtuoso Wu Fei. She worked with The NY Public Theater on two original works: the autobiographical Post-American Girl as well as Letters from Appalachia with Stella Ragsdale. Abigail has served as TED Fellow, DisTIL Fellow at the UNC Chapel Hill, and US-China Fellow at Vanderbilt University. Abigail has a deep interest in the power of cross-cultural storytelling and listening, both locally and globally, to enrich the human experience with the depth of difference and the magnetism of shared reality.
