Brett Ratliff is a 2022 United States Artists Fellow in Traditional Arts. He teaches and performs traditional Appalachian musical styles and repertoire, especially mountain banjo styles and labor-rights music of his native East Kentucky coalfields.

Ratliff has been invited to share music and stories of his home at such venues as: The Festival of American Fiddle Tunes, in Port Townsend, WA; Third Man Records in Nashville, TN; Nimble Fingers Music Festival, in British Columbia, Canada; the Swannanoa Gathering in Swannanoa, NC; Augusta Heritage Old-Time Week in Elkins, WV; and Sore Fingers Week in Oxfordshire, England. He has also performed on more than a dozen recordings, including those for Smithsonian Folkways, The Kentucky Center for Traditional Music, Old Town School of Folk Music, and The Oxford American.

Born and raised in Van Lear, Kentucky, Ratliff has spent his career as a community arts organizer throughout East Kentucky where in 2005 he helped found Kentucky Old Time Music Inc., a nonprofit supporting infrastructure for the practice of folk and traditional arts in the Commonwealth.

In 2021 Ratliff began a collaboration with filmmaker Ethan Payne, co-producing a series of short documentaries featuring rural Appalachian artists. Bright Morning Stars: The Johnsons of Hemphill (2022) is the first of these films to be released, receiving the Judge’s Award at the Boone Docs Film Festival, and Official Selection at both the Fort Myers Beach International Film Festival and the Miami Independent Film Festival.

Ratliff’s solo records include Cold Icy Mountain (June Appal Recordings, 2008), Gone Boy (Emperor Records, 2017), and Whitesburg, KY (June Appal Recordings, 2021), receiving critical acclaim from such outlets as No Depression, Maverick Country Music Magazine, and The Museum of Americana.