Elsa Johanna Mohr

Mohr was born in Düsseldorf in 1990. Even as a teenager, she wrote her own songs in German and English and sang in her own bands. She spent a year abroad in Foz do Iguaçu in the state of Paraná, Brazil, and after graduating from high school completed an internship at the Goethe-Institut in Salvador, Bahia. She completed her bachelor’s degree in Munich and Montpellier, focusing on Portuguese and Brazilian literary studies, with a thesis on the Brazilian composer Dorival Caymmi (1914–2008) and the role of women in his songs.

She then studied jazz vocals at the Institute of Music at Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences, including with Simin Tander, Tobias Christl, and Efrat Alony. She also participated in workshops with, among others, Becca Stevens and Dan Weiss, and performed on stage as a backing vocalist alongside the Afro-Brazilian jazz and soul singer Ed Motta.

She collaborates with Brazilian guitarists Flávio Nunes and Alex de Macedo. She is also a member of the quartet ANTIGUA, for which she composes music influenced by Latin American rhythms and Gypsy jazz, and writes lyrics in Portuguese, English, French, Spanish, and German. Since 2018, Mohr has lived in Cologne, and for her solo project she occasionally invites guest musicians.

With her vocal trio LUAH, she won the audience award at the JazzTube Festival in 2019 and performed at the Pantheon Theater in Bonn. In 2020, she was a scholarship holder of the Norbert Janssen Foundation, which supports “young people with talents and passions.” With LUAH’s second album MO VI MENTO, she won the German Jazz Prize in April 2023 in the category “Vocal Album of the Year.”

As a freelance singer, she teaches vocals and is a member of the KUS collective, which offers workshops on body and voice throughout Germany.