Kathleen Rivera

Biography

Kathleen “Kate” Rivera is an electric guitarist & composer from Brooklyn, NY. She is also the frontperson, songwriter, and manager of Demeter, a five-piece independent rock band. Feminine, heavy, and choral - their songs are poetry-focused, femme centered, and infused with multiple genres. Their first EP, The Year of Goodbye, was released in August of 2020 to international play and positive reviews calling the band “hedonistic psyche revelry” and comparing it to “jazz, blues and no wave all meeting at the poetry slam.” The group recently worked with Big Thief producer Dom Monks, Jay Som, and Idania Valencia on new music, soon to be released under Revolver Records - the oldest independent music label in the UK.

Kathleen Rivera is a proud Puerto Rican American and has been active in the NY music scene since 2017, when she first toured with the beloved, Brooklyn-born, queer punk Latinx group Amor Prohibido. She is also happily associated with several NY groups, including Carli and the Dark, Modern Diet, Moon Hound, and Balustrades. From 2014 to 2018, Kathleen served as the lead researcher and liaison for the Global Jukebox project - an online archive of the Alan Lomax folk music collection. As a collaborative project from the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and Lomax’s Association for Cultural Equity, the Global Jukebox project provides free listening access to folk music from around the world and works to support more significant equity for the families of folk performers and for cultures marginalized by the western listening canon. On the project, Rivera worked closely with Anna Lomax, First Nation scholars, the International Library of African Music, the British Library, and independent musicologists to ensure the highest quality of respect for the performers, their music, and the history of cultures represented in the collection.

From 2014 to 2015, Kathleen also worked as the outreach manager for the NY Composers Collective, a collective formed in 2014 by a group of evening division students from the Juilliard School. Together the group composed new chamber and orchestral works and organized community performances. Kathleen served as a point person for musician and venue outreach and helped organize their largest-scale project, a full orchestra concert at the Flushing Town Hall in 2015.

She most recently managed adult music programming at Third Street Music School Settlement from 2021 - 2023 and holds a BA in music & anthropology from Hunter College. Kate now serves on the board of directors of Ensemble NYC - an organization that seeks to bring healing and joy to NY through free programming, low-cost music education, workshops for musicians, equitable employment for performers, and community partnerships. At this moment, Kate is most likely brewing a new pot of coffee somewhere in Brooklyn.