Atea is a fourth year Performance Studies major with a minor in BEMT. She is interested in the ways in which race, politics and the law intersect with music, especially within hip-hop.

Title of Capstone Project

Censoring the Break

Description of Capstone Project

Censoring the Break is a project that uses various sampling copyright cases to explore copyright's function as a means of silencing and surveilling hip-hop artists. It’s interested in the ways in which the law, race, and capitalism interact within these cases of sampling copyright infringement. Censoring the Break analyzes the ways in which copyright has fundamentally changed hip-hop as a whole, as well as practices which hip-hop artists have employed to resist erasure.

Why PS @ NYU?

I chose Performance Studies because it constantly pushes me to dig beneath what’s on the surface of various forms of performance. I’ve always believed that music should have a message and Performance Studies gives me the opportunity to analyze not only the social and political significance of music, but all art forms.