Woodbridge, VA · folk · instrumental · acoustic

Yasmin Williams

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Fingerstyle guitarist who lays the instrument flat on her lap, taps it like a piano and adds kalimba and tap shoes; her Nonesuch album Acadia is instrumental folk built from one note at a time.

Williams was born on May 31, 1997, and grew up in Woodbridge, Virginia; she later graduated from New York University in December 2017 with a degree in music theory and composition. She started teaching herself guitar after playing Guitar Hero II, and by her teens had also picked up bass, twelve-string and classical guitar before settling on the acoustic as her main instrument.

Her style involves laying the guitar flat across her lap, strings facing up, and playing it with both hands the way a pianist would, an approach that kept the two-handed independence she developed on a game controller. She also brings a kalimba into her arrangements, wears tap shoes to keep rhythm, and has at times drawn a cello bow across the strings.

Her first release, the self-produced EP Serendipity, came out in 2012 when she was still a teenager. She followed it with the album Unwind in 2018, which sharpened her lap-tapping technique and folded in instruments like the kalimba; it included 'New Beginnings,' a piece she had written in high school.

Urban Driftwood, released on Spinster Records in 2021, was written during the 2020 lockdown and shaped by that summer's Black Lives Matter protests. Acadia followed on Nonesuch in 2024 and reached number 100 on the UK Album Downloads Chart and number 39 on the UK Americana Chart.

In April 2025, Williams wrote to Kennedy Center interim executive director Richard Grenell to raise concerns about the rollback of diversity programs and other changes under the Trump administration, saying the moves had led several artists she knew to cancel shows there. Grenell replied that cancellations were political rather than principled. That September, his office arranged for a group of Log Cabin Republicans to attend and disrupt one of her performances at the center.

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