The word “busy” doesn’t describe the life of Seneca graduate Jully Black these days.

“I don’t use that word anymore,” she said. “I’m productive.”

So far this year, the 44-year-old singer-songwriter, producer and actress has released two singles — No Relation and Half Empty — with one more on its way. Her next album, Three Rocks and a Slingshot, is slated to drop this fall.

Ms. Black also had a short run on The Amazing Race Canada this summer with her friend Kathy Hunter. 

As if that’s not “productive” enough, Ms. Black, who has been dubbed “Canada’s Queen of R&B,” is working on launching a television show and an artist management company, writing her memoirs, organizing a grief and loss support group and keeping up with her activism work on child abuse and mental health.

“Just because I was born with a beautiful voice doesn’t mean I can only sing,” she said. “My goal is to pay forward and use my character to service humanity.”

Ms. Black grew up in Toronto’s Jane and Finch community. The youngest of nine siblings, she was one of four in her family to attend Seneca.

While she was discovered by Warner Chappell Music at the age of 19, Ms. Black decided to enrol in Seneca’s Police Foundations diploma program, which, she says, launched her activism work.

“A lot of my friends were being racially profiled by police and unfairly treated,” she said. “I wanted to learn about my rights and what’s in the criminal code. The program really empowered me to be comfortable asking questions.”

Ms. Black recalls having “all the energy in the world” juggling classes at King Campus and late-night studio sessions. She didn’t tell any of her classmates about her music career, not even when she won her first Juno Award while still a student at Seneca.

“Nobody knew until the video came out,” she said of her collaboration with Toronto rapper Choclair on the song What It Takes, which won a Juno for Best Rap Recording in 1997. “By then, I had graduated.”

Since then, Ms. Black has gone on to perform with Celine Dion, Etta James, Elton John, Bon Jovi, Alicia Keys and Kanye West. She has also written songs for Destiny’s Child, Nas and others.

Last year, she was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame and was recently honoured with the Legends of Live Award during Canadian Music Week.

“As a child of immigrants, I call myself a surrogate dreamer,” Ms. Black said. “I’m carrying my parents’ dreams, too. My mom was born in Jamaica in 1937. She wanted to be an actor and a comedian but didn’t get the chance. I’m my mom reincarnated.”

After Ms. Black’s mother passed away in 2017, she contemplated quitting as an entertainer. But the theatre came calling and reinvigorated her. Ms. Black’s stage work included a starring role in the musical Caroline, or Change, a story of a Black woman working as a maid for a Jewish family in 1963 Louisiana.

For her performance as Caroline, Ms. Black won both the Toronto Theatre Critics Award and the Dora Mavor Moore Award.

“I came back at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement,” she said. “Art was imitating life, and that’s where the universe conspired to put me.”

On the one-year anniversary of her mother’s death, Ms. Black gave a TED talk on How to Rewrite Your Life — a subject still near and dear to her heart.

“The beautiful thing about grief is that it’s a great way to show you where you are in your maturation,” she said. “There’s realizing all the things that don’t define who you are or where you come from. It’s what you do that’s revealing.”