On a quiet street tucked away in Austin, the lawn outside Susanna Sharpe’s home comes alive with the tuning of instruments and the chatter of neighbors settling in with fold-up chairs and blankets. It’s not your average concert venue, but for Sharpe — a longtime musician and editor — it’s the perfect representation of what music encompasses: community.
Her lawn concerts often include several of Sharpe’s musician friends and family, as well as occasional appearances by neighbors with other talents such as tap dancing. Every few months, neighbors, students, friends and co-workers gather to experience an evening of unique performances. Attendees tip the musicians, and in the early days, before the crowd grew, Sharpe paid them herself.
“Sometime in the last year, it was the anniversary of the lawn concerts, and my neighbors made this huge photo wall of all these moments and gave it to me as a gift,” Sharpe says. “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t have the most wonderful neighbors. It’s a wonderful community.”
The now-beloved music event began with a one-off outdoor performance from Sharpe’s son, Paulo Santos, for a small group of neighbors trying to remain safely connected in the height of a pandemic while enjoying what Sharpe calls “bootleg margaritas.”
“There were maybe five people on my front lawn,” she says. “Everybody was like, ‘It’s so nice to hear music,’ and we were so happy to be together despite everything. Here I was on my second margarita, and I thought, ‘We should have a lawn concert!’ That’s how this was born.”
Margaritas weren’t the only source of inspiration for her impromptu musical venture. Sharpe, the communications coordinator for the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, has always been heavily involved in her music-making as a vocalist and is well known in Austin’s music scene as a performer, focusing primarily on singing and playing Brazilian music.
Inspired by an exchange program in Mexico, Sharpe fell in love with Spanish music from Latin America and later with Brazilian music in college. She traveled from her studies in Connecticut to visit The University of Texas at Austin long before she returned as part of the staff. It was on this campus that she took an intensive Portuguese class over the summer and became even more immersed.
“When I fell in love with Brazilian music, I knew I had to know this language because Portuguese is such a beautiful language,” Sharpe says. “I came here to study it, so everything’s sort of connected.”
For Sharpe, music is a strong through line with everything she does. As a young child, she was exposed to music through her mother, who was a writer, singer and songwriter. Additionally, Sharpe saw herself through her father, a writer and publisher in the social sciences. Now, Sharpe says, she often witnesses the same overlap in her work with the University as well as in her work as a performer.
“It’s very interesting being a musician, a writer and an editor because they’re totally connected through my family,” she says. “Words and music have always been so important and so completely linked in my life, so working here is great.”
Although the opportunities to perform have become less frequent than they once were several years ago, Sharpe keeps up with her musical side through occasional sets with her own seven-piece band.
“I don’t perform that often, so I get the most out of any performance opportunity by choosing repertoire that I like and by playing with people that I enjoy playing with,” she says. “I also try to transmit some important feelings of community, beauty, love and humor — anything to be present in the performance.”
When she isn’t putting together a lawn concert or performing Brazilian music at gigs around Austin, Sharpe comes off the stage and goes behind the scenes to publicize news at the institute, as well as recent acquisitions at the Benson Latin American Collection. She creates promotional materials for scholarly events, and she writes and edits for the institute’s website. She also serves as the editor for Portal magazine, an annual publication that highlights a variety of research related to the Benson Library’s collections and the interdisciplinary field of Latin American studies.
“I have the opportunity to publish writing by students and faculty, and it’s been a real opportunity for me to showcase the huge breadth of Latin American studies at UT,” Sharpe says. “It’s so interdisciplinary, so there are articles about different topics and to showcase all the amazing students here.”
I want my community to spill outside the boundaries of the club, bar, restaurant or wherever I am — and be someone who lifts people up.
With such a wide variety of disciplines across the institute, Sharpe says the possibilities for academic exploration are endless, and being a witness to the process is an especially rewarding part of the job.
“There are people from all over Latin America and the U.S. who come here because they have a very specific idea of what they want to pursue,” Sharpe says. “It’s not always the same. It might be archaeology, social activism or justice for Black women in prisons. … And they’re all here working together. I feel like they’re my teachers, too.”
Outside of her work at the institute, Sharpe stays connected to her musical roots as a volunteer board member for the Austin Jazz Workshop, a local nonprofit organization that exposes young minds to the power of music by offering live jazz performances to over 100 Central Texas elementary schools.
Whether she is performing, sharing the work of students and faculty at the institute or volunteering in the Austin community, Sharpe ensures she can meaningfully connect with those around her. Especially as a communications coordinator, she says her mission is to ensure everyone she meets and works with feels seen and cared for.
“I want to know who they are so I can show the world who they are,” Sharpe says. “It means I have a connection to them that really goes beyond the walls of this place. I really feel that way about everything I do. I want my community to spill outside the boundaries of the club, bar, restaurant or wherever I am — and be someone who lifts people up.”
