NIKKI LYNETTE is a performer, writer and visual artist who has been fusing mental health activism into her edgy performance art since 2016. Her dedication to thriving with a serious mental illness informs for her art & her advocacy. This Chicago native’s self-produced tunes are frequently featured in popular shows on Netflix, Hulu, Showtime and more. Seeing her music used to tell stories on tv evolved into an interest in filmmaking. After a long hiatus from releasing new music, Nikki Lynette returned to the public eye 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, the first AMTP work to debut at Steppenwolf, as well as the first Steppenwolf LookOut Series work and first female AMTP alum to be featured at NAMT’s Festival of New Musicals. Since adapting her musical about depression to film during the pandemic, GET OUT ALIVE has been invited into over a dozen film festivals, nominated for 5 film awards and won 3 of them. A proud ambassador & board member for the Chicago chapter of 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. Her popular podcast “About a Girl” has recently been renewed by iHeartRadio for a fourth season. Her mental health docuseries Happy Songs About Unhappy Things is currently in production.
