Bio & Project Information
La Doña is a solo artist, music educator, activist and cultural worker from San Francisco, CA. La Doña, born Cecilia Cassandra Peña-Govea, 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.
La Doña will use the ReGen Artist Fund for the creation of an album that explores the relationship that
artists, activists, homegirls and youth have to their neighborhoods in San Francisco. The work will focus on
integrating poetry, composition, field recordings, and interviews from youth from schools in the Mission and the Bayview with her own compositions, which focus on the fusion of traditional Afro-Indigenous musics with contemporary music production.