Brooklyn-based visual artist and composer Dana Lyn has collaborated and performed with Tony Award-winning songwriters Stew and Heidi Rodewald, actor-directors Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio, 2017 MacArthur Fellow Taylor Mac, D’Angelo, Bruce Springsteen, Natalie Merchant, Heather Christian, avant cellist Hank Roberts, and Irish poet Louis de Paor, among others. She has received commissions from Brooklyn Rider, the National Arts Council of Ireland, the Apple Hill String Quartet, violinist Johnny Gandelsman, violist Nicholas Cords, A Far Cry, and Palaver Strings. Her theater credits include the Public Theater’s production of Hamlet (Shakespeare in the Park, 2008); The Cherry Orchard and The Winter’s Tale (The Bridge Project at BAM, 2009), Clive, (The New Group, 2013); Family Album (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2014). She currently plays in the band of the Tony and Grammy Award-winning musical, Hadestown.

She has made eight albums as a bandleader or co-bandleader and has created album art for five of them; she has made stop-motion animated music videos for her own music as well as for Taylor Mac, Slim Bone Head Volt (her spoken-word and music collaboration with Vincent D’Onofrio), children’s artist Elena Moon Park, poet Louis de Paor, her duo with guitarist Kyle Sanna, and acclaimed woodwind players Ben Goldberg and Mike McGinnis. She has written music for short films, New York Times’ audio stories, and for dance. Her contributions to the Ken Burns documentary American Holocaust were called “sublime” by The Boston Globe. Dana is also a well-versed fiddle player in the Irish tradition.

Her own musical projects include the sextet “Mother Octopus“, her aforementioned collaborations with D’Onofrio, Sanna, and De Paor, and a trio with Sanna and pianist Matt Kanelos, called We The Gleaners. She performed in Taylor Mac’s 24 Decades of Popular Music in 24 Hours, Bark of Millions and Holiday Sauce; “Notes of a Native Song” by Stew and the Negro Problem, and is a member of the Hank Roberts Sextet. Dana was an artist-in-residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in the Spring of 2017, an awardee of the 2018 American Composers Forum Create Commission, a recipient of a 2020 NYFA Women’s Fund Award for Media, Music and Theater and a Sundance Composer Lab Fellow in 2021. Her radio play with De Paor received a Gold Award at the 2022 New York Festivals Radio Awards. Her recently released album “A Point on a Slow Curve (In-a-Circle Records)” is a suite of music for septet and four voices; “brilliantly capturing the rigours and abandon of creativity (A Closer Listen)”, it has been featured on WNYC’s New Sounds program and noted for it “singular expressionism, incorporating forms common to the modern jazz idiom alongside chamber, choir, folk, and avant-garde (Dave Sumner, The Bird is the Worm).”