Top: Damali Willingham at an April 2024 New Haven Symphony Orchestra Young People's Concert. Bottom: Jenkins at Kulturally LIT Fest, held at the Stetson Branch Library and Dixwell Community Q House, in 2022. Lucy Gellman File Photos.
The following citizen contribution was submitted by Mimsie Coleman, a member of the committee that founded and runs the Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists.
The Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists (the Bitsie Fund) is pleased to announce that artists Tyler Jenkins and Damali Willingham are recipients of the 2024 Bitsie Fund grants. Each will receive a $5,000 award, enabling them to pursue projects significant to their development as artists.
Jenkins, who also performs as Tyler Goldchain, is a New Haven based instrumentalist, artist and composer, whose artistic journey began with the “spiritual and vibrant” music he heard in his grandmother’s Jamaican storefront church in Bridgeport (read more about that here, in a profile by youth arts journalist Shekinah Murray).
At age four, he was playing the drums in church, which gave him a musical foundation. By fourth grade, he was playing multiple instruments including the keyboard, drums, and guitar. Outside of church and school, he loved the game Guitar Hero, using it as a creative launchpad that never got old.
“I thought that was the coolest game ever,” he remembered in a 2023 interview with Murray.
From there, Jenkins carved a path of continuous musical accomplishments, for which he credits both public funding and strong mentorship that continues today. In middle school, his receipt of a City Initiative Grant (a funding collaboration among Neighborhood Music School, the New Haven Public Schools and Yale University’s Music in the Schools Initiative) allowed him to pursue free drum lessons at NMS, which he did from seventh through twelfth grade.
He also deepened his craft as a student at Wilbur Cross High School and the Educational Center for the Arts (ECA) on Audubon Street, studying music at both schools. During that time, he was awarded the first chair in the Connecticut Music Education Association (CMEA) All-State Jazz Band, and later received a Musicianship Award from the Berklee School of Music.
In 2018—his senior year at Cross—Jenkins wrote a song entitled “Save Me,” performing it at a nationwide student walk out to protest gun violence. The song was picked up by NPR, then included in “Raise Your Voice,” an album of student protest songs produced by Grammy-winning producer Jim Pugh.
Just months after that walkout, Jenkins graduated from high school, heading to Wesleyan University on a full scholarship. While he pursued a degree in comparative government, he kept playing and producing music, scoring several short student films outside of the classroom. One of them, Graveyard, won multiple awards, including “Best Original Score” by the Los Angeles Crime and Horror Film Festival and “Best Crime Short” by the LA-based IndieX Fest.
Since graduation, Jenkins has dramatically expanded his reach. He sang background on Alicia Keys’ 2022 World Tour and founded a music composition company called Goldchain Entertainment. His 2023 Uplift Project, an educational program in the style of a late-night show and TEDx, helped high school students and young adults learn about mental health, personal finance and the music business.
He also composed music for the play Death by a Thousand Cuts, written and directed by fellow Bitsie Fund Awardee Steve Driffin. This past spring, Jenkins was accepted into the inaugural class of the Composer Spotlight Program, funded by the Mellon Foundation and the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. In the program, he composed a three-movement piece for a chamber ensemble of 16 musicians.
In New Haven, where he is based, Jenkins continues to soar. He is currently composing his first feature film, entitled Every Other Kid and directed by Patrick Godino, and composing for an experimental dance film directed by Connell Oberman. He has also received his first orchestral commission from the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, an arrangement for its February 2025 family concert based on “Anansi the Spider.”
His project for the Bitsie Fund is an original composition written for New Haven musicians. He describes this upcoming piece as an “introspective meditation of love and healing.” It “articulates the semi-autobiographical perspective of a black boy experiencing love in his life” and “purposely differs from the trauma-based storytelling that is very popular in the media,” he said.
He finds the project exciting due to its emphasis on collaboration and healing, with roots in musical engagement and multiple eras of music. The Bitsie Fund grant will help provide the necessary resources and support the creative talent needed to complete the project.
Grantee Damali Willingham is a conductor, composer, musician and educator living in New Haven, where they work as an operations assistant with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. After picking up the saxophone at age nine and bassoon at 11, they began composing at just 13. A year later, they were conducting for the first time. By the time they graduated from high school, they had fallen in love with the craft.
By the time they started their studies at the University of Georgia, where they studied from 2017 to 2018, they were composing work for the Emory Youth Symphony Orchestra, with performances from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra that followed a year later.
Willingham’s upward trajectory continued at the Berklee College of Music, where they served as music director and guest conductor of numerous ensembles including the Berklee Motion Picture Orchestra, the college’s largest student-run ensemble. Since graduating Summa Cum Laude, Willingham has continued to garner accolades and awards, including a prestigious conducting award at the 2023 Aspen Conducting Academy.
They are currently working as a teaching artist and conducting fellow with the Greater Connecticut Youth Orchestras, fulfilling a passion for teaching and working with youth. The 2024 Bitsie Fund grant will support a new project exploring the music of their ancestors and the breadth of their full identity.
"The confines of classical music don't provide the space for all parts of my artistic identity to be expressed,” Willingham said. “And I know that there is a tremendous potential for me to grow into the parts of my artistry that have been neglected by the classical pedagogy."
“Rounding out my skill sets in this way will bring joy and honesty into the work I do which I want to be the basis of the career that I build,” they added. They added that they are committed to collaboration with some of the musicians in the New Haven area, and through that collaboration, to bring life, health and spiritual vitality to the community through music.
The Bitsie Fund was founded in 2018 in honor of Frances “Bitsie” Clark, the executive director of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven for 20 years, who helped launch the Audubon Arts District and helped establish the arts as a driving economic force in Greater New Haven.
Previous grantees include puppeteer and multimedia artist Isaac Bloodworth, photographer Alexandra Diaz, playwright Steve Driffin, musician Jake Gagne, composer and musician Adam Matlock, hip-hop poet and playwright Aaron Jafferis, artists Linda Vauters Mickens and Jeff Ostergren. Read more about them here.
The mission of the Fund is to continue Bitsie’s commitment to artists in Greater New Haven by offering grants for individual artists to pursue a significant goal at a turning point in their development. Learn more here.
Lucy Gellman and Shekinah Murray contributed to this piece.