La Doña

La Doña is a solo artist, music educator, activist and cultural worker from San Francisco, CA. Born Cecilia Cassandra Peña-Govea, she began her career at age seven playing trumpet, strings and percussion in her family’s conjunto. She is a student, teacher and preservationist of Latinx traditional arts like corrido, bolero, cumbia, and mariachi. In her compositions, she combines these ancestral traditions with contemporary diasporic musics like reggaeton, hip-hop and jazz. La Doña’s live performances are grounded in ceremony and social mobilization; she and her audiences sing, dance, cry and chant together, for collective healing and political action. La Doña’s roles as a teaching artist within San Francisco and Oakland Unified School Districts via SFJazz and Community Music Center inspire and inform her work as a composer, arranger, and band-leader. As a young, queer Latina, La Doña is concerned with representing stories not often told in the mainstream music industry, and providing amplification and audience to other young artists of color. La Doña was chosen as one of YouTube’s Foundry Artists (2019) and she has performed at Lollapalooza and Outside Lands music festivals. Her song, “Quién Me La Paga” was the first of the New York Times Magazine’s “19 Songs that Matter Now,” for 2020, and her EPs, Algo Nuevo and Can’t Eat Clout have been selected by the San Francisco Chronicle as two of the best albums of 2020 and 2023, respectively. La Doña was awarded the San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artists Grant in 2021 and was the recipient of the YBCA’s Guaranteed Income Program in 2022. La Doña is a 2023-2024 apprentice in zapateado with the California Alliance for Traditional Arts, and recipient of the East Bay Fund for Artists Grant ‘23. She is a fellow for California Creative Corps 2024. She has toured internationally with artists including Cuco, Helado Negro, Durand Jones & the Indications, and Kaina. La Doña is set to release her debut album, Los Altos de la Soledad in 2024.