NIKKI LYNETTE (she/her) is a social impact artist whose individual style is equal parts hip hop, alternative, and pop. An unapologetic suicide survivor, she fuses mental health activism into her performances and visual art, creating a lane that is uniquely her own. This Chicago native’s self-produced tunes are frequently featured in popular shows on Netflix, Hulu, Showtime and more. Lynette’s success in music licensing has earned its own accolades, including a prominent feature in Billboard Magazine and speaking engagements at South By Southwest. Seeing her music used to tell stories on tv would soon lead Nikki to an interest in filmmaking. After a hiatus from releasing new music, Nikki Lynette returned to the public eye in 2016 with a confession: she’d secretly been battling mental health issues. She began writing articles about depression and suicide for prominent sites like BlackDoctor, Afropunk and AllHipHop. As the opening act for Pussy Riot’s first American tour Nikki workshopped the material that would soon become her musical about depression, GET OUT ALIVE. Nikki has made history as the first black female playwright to have a musical produced by American Music Theatre Project and the first AMTP work to debut at Steppenwolf. The musical will return to the stage in summer of 2022 for a 19 show run at The Den Theatre, located in the heart of Chicago’s trendy Wicker Park neighborhood. Since adapting her musical about depression to film during the pandemic, GET OUT ALIVE has been invited into 9 film festivals, nominated for 4 film awards and won 3 of them. A proud ambassador for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Nikki Lynette’s first TEDx Talk, hosted by Princeton University, was an opportunity for her to share how her punk culture roots aided her suicide recovery. Nikki has opened for Lion Babe and Leikeli47, and headlined her own sold-out show in the Foundation Room at the House of Blues. In 2021 she entered the world of podcasting as the host of the popular iHeartRadio series “About a Girl.” Her mental health docuseries Happy Songs About Unhappy Things is currently in production.