Mateo Lincoln
Harvard College
Silkroad
Boston, MA
Mateo is a junior in Currier House studying Comparative Literature and Music, who works to find intersections between the arts and public service. As a pianist, music director, and composer, he strives to confront the fact that music (particularly classical music) is all too often reserved for a narrow sliver of society, removed from the public good.
For him, an awareness of these intersections between music and society began in high school when he founded a concert series in his hometown of Newburyport, Massachusetts, through the Boston-based nonprofit Music for Food, for which all proceeds were given to a local food pantry.
This summer, through the Presidential Public Service Fellowship, Mateo is delighted to pursue an internship in Boston with the Silkroad Project, founded in 1998 by Yo-Yo Ma to promote cross-cultural musical exchange. As a group, Silkroad works regularly in refugee camps abroad, in urban public schools, and on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Lame Deer, Montana—all with the goal of inspiring people with music to “build a more hopeful world,” in the words of their mission. One day, Mateo hopes to use his own composition and conducting to the same ends.