Grammy-winning artist Solange Knowles is in her academic era. The 39-year-old superstar artist has been named the first all-school scholar in residence at USC Thornton School of Music. This prestigious professor role allows creatives like Knowles to share their expertise and engage with the collegiate community. Knowles’s custom, three-year residency will see her teaching a course on music curation, hosting workshops for students, and helping faculty build long-term programmatic frameworks for the music school. 

The course that Knowles is developing is called Records of Discovery: Methodologies for Music and Cultural Curatorial Practices and will launch in Fall 2027. She will also join USC Thornton’s Dean’s Creative Vanguard Program, becoming the second invited creative after legendary producer Raphael Saadiq.

“I am eager to use the coming year to further develop and solidify my syllabus, Records of Discovery, with Saint Heron, as well as the curriculum I look forward to teaching on the methodologies of musical curation,” Knowles said in a statement. “My goal is to nurture students’ curiosity in this field while advancing educational frameworks that reflect the expansiveness of the landscapes—both sonically and visually—that surround musical expressions.”

Her residency began with “Beyond Category,” a special public conversation at USC’s Newman Recital Hall on October 13, and the event featured the singer in conversation with USC Thornton dean Jason King and Saint Heron collaborators Shantel Aurora and Sablā Stays. 

Next up in her residency, Knowles will help organize a series of student workshops throughout the 2025–2026 academic year — including one exploring her acclaimed Eldorado Ballroom concert series, which honors Black artists who transformed music and art. She’s also slated to participate in a 2026 USC symposium titled On Dissonance: Black Women in Classical Music.

She told The Los Angeles Times, “I am a G.E.D. graduate. I was a teenage mom. I was pregnant with my son at 17, so I didn’t get to further my education in the classical sense.”

She continued, “But I was really blessed and honored to have enriched these other parts of education through my art, through travel [and] through the globalization of my life … so to be able to have access and broader tools as a scholar in residence, to enrich that and deepen that, is really so exciting for me.” 

King expressed confidence in her ability to bring her curatorial and creative vision into the academic realm, highlighting how her work with Saint Heron, the multidisciplinary platform she founded, makes this historic appointment a no-brainer. 

The star told Harper’s Bazaar in a 2024 cover story, “I’m taking care of the work that I’m doing so that people will be able to come directly to the source when they want to know my story,” she said at the time. “So much of what I’m being pulled by now is making sure that there is physical evidence of my legacy, making sure that I have tangible objects and history that people can hold in their hands as an embodiment of who I am and how I showed up in the world.”

Solange is building a glorious body of work that speaks directly to her affinity as a historian. The “Cranes in the Sky” singer also announced that she will be expanding her Saint Heron universe with a new digital library. It’s clear she is a woman of her word.