NicoleKeeping

Nicole Keeping

Nicole Keeping is a queer artist, radio host, and music teacher currently residing in Kjipuktuk (Halifax). Born and raised in Corner Brook NL, she left for university in 2017 and started the Foundation Year Program at the University of King’s College and graduated in 2021 with her Bachelor of Music at Dalhousie University’s Fountain School of Performing Arts. During her time there, she finally started to explore and embrace her sexuality and began to find her voice as an artist. In school, she met her now-fiancee Emma James, another FSPA student studying acting. After they graduated in 2021, they moved to the North End. Their joint artistic venture, the Spare Key Collective, recently created and produced ‘Sappho’s Garden,’ a folk opera about the ancient Greek lesbian poet Sappho, which was presented at the 2022 Halifax Fringe Festival.

Around the same time they were writing this show, Nicole started working as a radio programmer at CKDU. Since there weren’t many students to teach in the summer, Nicole started looking for a job to fill those months. It was then that she saw an ad posted searching for an LGBTQIA+ radio programmer to highlight local queer music. She had always dreamed about finding a way to make money from curating playlists, a frequent hobby of hers, and so after an interview (and a lot of manifestation) she started to work at CKDU in July, 2022. That summer, she hosted the show ‘Out to Brunch’, but the station knew they wanted her to host her own show. When coming up with the name, she pulled from her in-the-work folk opera and decided on ‘Something Sapphic’. Here, every weekday, from 11:00am til noon, she gets to play queer music across all genres, and talk to different local artists and activists about being gay in Halifax.

CKDU Radio Show

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