Rita has studied with many great musicians at several highly distinguished institutions and holds Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Arts degrees.  She currently teaches singing in the Jazz Department at York University in Toronto.  She regularly produces and performs in large-scale shows.  Some of her recent productions include "Two Generations of Jazz", a double-bill with jazz legend Sheila Jordan, "The Great Jazz Piano and Voice Series", and "The Canadian Independent Jazz Vocal Artists (CIJVA) Showcase".  In the summer of 1998 Rita toured with the self-written and self-produced show "Great Ladies of Jazz: the lives and music of Sarah Vaughan, Anita O'Day, Peggy Lee, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen Mcrae and Annie Ross".  Her Sprawl project is being presented at major Canadian jazz festivals coast to coast in June and July of 1999.

Reviews of her debut album all decreed Rita a unique voice.  The album, "Mindin' the Shop", was a neo-traditional tribute to her musical influences.  This latest project marks the birth of a jazz style of her own invention: Sprawl.  Whereas Sprawl shares features with other swing, funk and hiphop styles, its uniqueness lies in the incorporation of melodic, harmonic or lyrical elements from jazz standard repertoire.  For example,  di Ghent's Signs of Spring in My Neighbourhood is alternative hip hop, with a bassline that paraphrases the theme to Spring is My Joy, an intro that borrows from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and horn shots devised from other jazz standards about spring. 

Sometimes di Ghent shifts gears from a jazz standard— for which she's written lyrics— into a hip hop invention that expands upon the standard's lyrical content   (e.g. Whiting and Moret's She's Funny That Way becomes di Ghent's Jazz Habit; Miles Davis' So What  becomes di Ghent's So What, the Funk!;  McCoy Tyner's Search for Peace   becomes di Ghent's Peace Conspiracy.) 

The beginnings of Sprawl took shape as far back as 1989 when Rita started incorporating hip hop into jazz standards.  Rita was struggling to reconcile the need for the thematic content of vocal jazz  to evolve and the need to retain the "jazzness" of the new compositions.  It's often been pointed out that one of Rita's distinct features is that she doesn't just limit herself to singing about love relationships.  Her lyrics delve into the realness of her inner-city world:  poverty, predjudice, and hostility that exist alongside humanity's longing for spiritual evolution.