Associate Artistic Director

Since 1993, Andrea Jones Blackford has been affiliated with Washington Revels in many roles — chorus member; Board member; as founder and music director of the Washington Revels Jubilee Voices; and, since 2021, as Associate Artistic Director. Under her leadership since launching in 2010, the Jubilee Voices ensemble has made appearances at historic sites, community events and concert stages throughout the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, including the National Archives; the Benjamin Banneker Colonial Market Fair; Arlington House; the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site; Hampton National Historic Site; and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Jubilee Voices has been featured on the PBS show Time Team America and CNN’s Situation Room, and music from the ensemble was also featured in the finale of the PBS Civil War drama, Mercy Street.

Blackford was associate music director for the 2011 Washington Revels Recording Hard Times Come Again No More: American Music of the Civil War Era, and the soundtrack for the Heritage Montgomery documentary, Life in a War Zone: Montgomery County During the Civil War. She is also co-music director for the Washington Revels Heritage Voices.

Before founding Jubilee Voices, Andrea served as unit director for the 2006 American Christmas Revels, for the production’s African-American “Jonkonnu” sequence; portrayed educator Nannie Helen Burroughs in the Washington Revels/Library of Congress presentation, Discovering Hidden Washington; and was assistant director and performer for the initial production of Bridges of Song, Washington Revels’ collaboration with THEARC and Allen Chapel AME Church in Southeast Washington.

In addition to her work with Washington Revels she was music director for The Joyful Noise, a women’s quintet devoted to performance of early American sacred music she founded at the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection (Alexandria, VA). She spent six seasons as a member of the Capriccio Catch Club, a musical troupe at the Maryland Renaissance Festival. Andrea was a member of Foundry United Methodist Choir of Washington D.C. She has also sung with the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection Choir; St. Augustine Roman Catholic Church Gospel Choir and Chorale (Washington, D.C); and the Nevilla Ottley Singers (Silver Spring, MD).