Some careers follow a single lane. Lami Phillips does not, and she has stopped apologizing for it.
Born in Chicago and raised across the United States, the United Kingdom and Nigeria, she has built a working life that moves between boardrooms, embassies, recording studios and stages without losing coherence. She is a strategic cartographer and global leadership advisor, a United Nations Envoy, an Oxfam Ambassador for Women and Youth, and a trusted counsel to institutions, corporations and heads of state. She is also an award-winning singer, songwriter and stage performer whose latest project, a song called Broken Crayons paired with a personal documentary, marks what she describes not as a comeback but as the next honest chapter of a life lived in full view of contradiction.
A Vantage Point Built on Contrast
Lami’s institutional work sits at the point where authority, perception and structural coherence must align, whether that is inside a government ministry, a multinational corporation or an international organization working through a moment of change. Her academic record supports that range. She holds an Executive MBA from Penn State University, a Master’s degree in Strategic and Change Management from the University of Nottingham, and a BA with Honors from the University of Kent. She has added certifications from King’s College London in Change Management, Scrum and Project Management for Business Development, and Mental Health and People Management, along with a certification in Psychological First Aid from Johns Hopkins University.
That academic depth runs alongside a second, less conventional credential: an understanding of people that comes from years of paying attention. As she put it when asked what inspired her new song and the accompanying documentary, both came from observation. She has always been drawn to how people think, how they make decisions, the things they normalize, the identities they build and the stories they tell themselves to make sense of it all. Broken Crayons, in her words, is an invitation to stop, look again, and ask better questions.
The Artist Behind the Advisor
Her artistic career has taken her to stages and screens across continents, sharing platforms with artists including Boyz II Men, Burna Boy and Tiwa Savage, and contributing to film, theatre and music that wrestle with culture, power and belonging. She is candid that this is not a separate identity performed alongside her institutional work. Whether she is singing, acting, speaking or writing, she says, she is doing the same thing. She is telling stories. Music gives those stories melody. Acting gives them character. Writing gives them language. She has never been interested in collecting titles, and she does not wake up deciding to be a singer one day and an actor the next. She is a storyteller, and the medium simply depends on what the story needs.
That philosophy extends to how she talks about her return to public output after a quiet stretch. She rejects the word comeback outright, arguing that a comeback implies something ended, and for her nothing did. Visibility, she says, was never the same thing as value. Much of her new album was recorded live across Europe, built with what she calls meticulous intentionality, because she believes art needs time to mature before it meets the world. She describes herself, only half joking, as a nine-course tasting menu for a seasoned palate rather than fast food, and she is at peace with the fact that not everyone wants that kind of meal.
Roots Beneath the Polish
The documentary will be released tomorrow July 31st, while her new single; Broken Crayons would be released on Friday August 7th.
Lami was born into privilege and does not shy away from saying so. She is at home on the streets of Belgravia, and Ikoyi is written into her subconscious. But she traces her deepest roots further back, to the narrow streets of Isale Eko, and specifically to Okepopo, where much of her identity took shape. Sunday worship at a church in Aroloya was not occasional in her childhood. It was the rhythm of it. Her late grandmother, whom she describes as effectively a third parent, insisted that comfort never become entitlement, and largely refused to speak English to her so that she would learn Yoruba properly, a discipline she resented as a child and has come to value as an adult.
Years spent in England and the United States added another layer, exposing her to different systems, different creative influences and a different pace of life. The result, she says, is a refusal to belong fully to one world. Instead, she has learned to see people through a wider lens, to accept that life is rarely black and white, and to stop shrinking herself to fit expectations that make other people comfortable at the expense of her own complexity. That blend of heritage and range now shapes how she thinks, how she leads, how she raises her daughter, and how she writes music.
Therapist to the Powerful, Faculty to the Next Generation
Beyond diplomacy and the arts, Lami Phillips works as an expert therapist to high performing individuals and leaders, offering psychological grounding to people carrying the cognitive and emotional weight of sustained influence. She also serves as Adjunct Faculty with the African Leadership Centre at King’s College London, where she has facilitated executive programmes for leaders working within governance, policy and international institutional systems. It is, in effect, a continuation of the same instinct that drives her music and her diplomacy: translating complexity into something a person can actually use.
Unmistakably Herself
Asked what she hopes people take from the new work; she is clear that it was never about being understood by everyone. At this stage of her life, she says, she is interested in being unmistakably herself. She has stopped making decisions around expectation and started making them around conviction. If the music connects, she is grateful. If it challenges someone, that is fine too. If it starts a conversation, then it has done exactly what she hoped.
Lami is happily married with two daughters, and the throughline across every part of her working life, from UN briefings to recording booths to therapy sessions with the powerful, is the same: a refusal to simplify herself for anyone’s comfort, and a quiet insistence that the polished and the imperfect, the traditional and the unconventional, the local and the global, were never meant to be separated in the first place.
