Sultana Isham explores sound as biology through composition and ethnomusicology. She is an award-winning composer, violinist, scholar, and interdisciplinary fellow at The Sundance Institute. Isham was a researcher and the composer for the documentary All Skinfolk Ain’t Kinfolk about the historic mayor race between two Black women in New Orleans, directed by Emmy-nominated Angela Tucker. Isham’s score for the Emmy-nominated documentary The Neutral Ground premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, earning her an IDA nomination for best score of 2021. In 2023, she made her composer/conductor debut with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. Isham’s recent score for the Emmy-nominated HBO docu-series Stax: Soulsville, USA, received the TV Premiere Audience Award at SXSW. Isham has been published in academic and archival journals such as e-flux and UNC Press’ Southern Cultures. Her scholarship has expanded into a touring multi-sensory archival exhibition on the lives and works of performers-musicologists, Dr. Geneva Handy-Southall and D. Antoinette Handy. Her curation is in collaboration with their descendants of Handy Heights, Emory University, University of Minnesota, and University of Iowa Women’s Archive. Sultana is currently composing an immersive planetarium opera based on the research of brown dwarfs called Rogue Objects with director/librettist Janani Balasubramanian in collaboration with the astrophysicists of the American Museum of Natural History, set to debut in 2027. Sultana is currently working on a multimodal archival based project on World Famous Papa Joe's Female Impersonators. This work explores the social and cultural dynamics of a historically segregated, transsexual strip club at the intersection of fantasy and realism in New Orleans, Louisiana between 1950 and 2009.