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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.

  • Awarded NAMI Chicago’s Ambassador of the Year in 2021 for her work as a social impact artist
  • Winner of three indie film awards for her musical about depression, GET OUT ALIVE
  • Currently developing a mental health doc entitled “Happy Songs About Unhappy Things”
  • Currently preparing for a 19 show run of GET OUT ALIVE at The Den Theater in July 2022

I didn’t wanna do music no more. I mean, I kinda wanted to, but I thought it would be too hard to start over. You spend hella time out the game and everything changes. What I wanted was to not be here. I would wake up and be disappointed that I was awake, and just lay there for an hour before I could get outta bed. I spent a lot of time in bed. I only pushed myself to get better because of my momma. She was sick, and she needed me. So I pushed myself. I didn’t have hella support, because the stigma around mental health leaves a lot of room for lack of understanding, a lot of room for judgement, a lot of room for shame.

I realize now that my music career, by itself, is not enough of a motivator for me no more. I am motivated by people. Particularly people whose needs are underrepresented. Right now my inspiration is coming primarily from the battles I have fought, the ones I am still fighting, and the people who are fighting those battles with me. I think I have accomplished a lot of stuff that I can be proud of, but nothing makes me more proud than this. Until the mental health conversation is being had in a way that appeals to all the people who suffering, we ain’t gonna see no change. That don’t work for me. So I’m gonna do it.

Yours Truly:
© nikki Lynette 2022. All Rights Reserved.