Dr. Samantha Ege FRCM is an author, pianist, and music historian. She is best known for her award-winning work on the African American composer Florence Price and critically acclaimed recordings of underrepresented composers. ​

​

Dr. Ege's first book South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene was hailed by BBC Music Magazine as "a powerful corrective to the 'Great Man' theory of history." She regularly writes about African-descended composers, with bylines in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Statesman, and Prospect Magazine. Her research and recordings have been featured on NPR and in The Washington Post, The Telegraph, and The Economist. Her BBC Radio 3 documentaries, "Florence Price's Chicago and the Black Female Fellowship" and "Undine Smith Moore: The Dean of Black Women Composers," also reflect the breadth of her broadcasting work.​

​

She made her Barbican debut in 2021 with a "vivid, revelatory recital" (iNews) and inn 2021 also made the world premiere recording of Florence B. Price's complete Fantasie Nègre, hailed by the New York Times as "Triumphs indeed." She has performed across the UK, Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia, and played with orchestras such as the BBC Philharmonic, Oxford Philharmonic, Oakland Symphony, Arkansas Symphony, and New Haven Symphony.

​

On her latest album, Dr. Ege performs as the soloist alongside the BBC Philharmonic and conductor John Andrews in the world-premiere recording of Avril Coleridge-Taylor's Piano Concerto. Her next album, with John Andrews and the BBC Concert Orchestra, features new works by Shirley J. Thompson and Camila Cortina Bello alongside music by Ethel Bilsland that has not been heard in over a century.

​

Dr. Ege was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Music in 2025 and has received further distinctions including the 2021 American Musicological Society's Noah Greenberg Award and 2023 Society for American Music's Irving Lowens Article Award. She is a Lecturer at the University of Southampton and has held research positions at Southampton and as the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. In 2024, she was a Rose Library Visiting Research Fellow in the area of African American History and Culture at Emory University, and in 2019 received both a Society for American Music Eileen Southern Fellowship and a Newberry Library Short-Term Fellowship.

 

Dr. Ege holds a PhD in Musicology (York) and a BA (hons) in Music (Bristol). She spent her second undergraduate year at McGill as an exchange student.

​

Ege is pronounced Eh-geh (ɛgɛ)