Kinnie Starr

Kinnie Starr is a Juno Award-winning producer, multilingual songwriter, rapper, singer, filmmaker, visual artist, and uncompromising genre-blender. Across three decades, she has moved through hip-hop, alternative, rock, electronic, spoken word, and Indigenous musical futures with ferocity, tenderness, humour, and political clarity. Her tenth album, DestroyHer, is an urgent, grief-lit dispatch from Haida Gwaii. Carrying the force of a lifetime of advocacy and activism, it confronts climate collapse, extractive industry, technology addiction, colonial arrogance, misogyny, and the pressure to look away. It is also deeply personal: after 2018’s Feed the Fire, Starr lost her younger brother Chris to fentanyl, followed by the death of her father. In songs written for and around Chris, she refuses easy narratives about addiction and grief, choosing love and radical compassion instead. Starr’s path has always been her own. In the 1990s she drew major-label attention, performed at Lilith Fair, opened for Alanis Morissette, and toured across North America, Europe, and Japan. Beyond the stage, Auntie Kinnie’s Rap Skool reflects her commitment to community, especially in remote and Indigenous communities. She won a Juno as a producer on Digging Roots’ We Are, challenged gender inequity in production with Play Your Gender, and helped open pathways for Indigenous musical movements with Red%X. For Kinnie Starr, music is medicine: survival, resistance, community, and joy.