Susan DeSelms

Music director and organist

Susan DeSelms has served as minister of music and organist at the United Parish in Brookline since 2001. She began laying the groundwork for the Negro Spiritual Royalties Project in 2020 and facilitated its launch in October 2021. She is also the choir director and Shabbat pianist at Temple Shir Tikva in Wayland, Massachusetts, and annually brings the church and temple choirs together to lead joint worship services.

She was the chair of the 2017 UCC Musicians Association National Conference in Boston: “Empowering Musicians, Transforming Communities.” In 2016, she helped launch and facilitate the End Mass Incarceration initiative at the United Parish with a churchwide reading and discussion of Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow.”