Akua Naru

Akua Naru, is a rapper from Connecticut, United States. Her hip-hop music incorporates styles including soul and jazz. In 2018 she began archiving the achievements of women in hip-hop at Harvard University as a Nasir Jones Hip-hop Fellow at the Hip-hop Archive Research Institute. Naru has been particularly successful in Europe, where she lived from 2008 until joining the music faculty at University of California, Santa Cruz in 2024. Presently, she holds a Pavel Machotka Chair in Creative Studies at Porter College.