Bio

Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist 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, performance artist Taylor Mac, Heather Christian, avant cellist Hank Roberts, D’Angelo, Bruce Springsteen, Natalie Merchant, 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. She currently plays in the band of the Tony and Grammy Award-winning musical, Hadestown and with The Great Yes, The Great No, by William Kentridge.

She has made eight albums as a bandleader or co-bandleader; she has also 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 player Ben Goldberg. She has written music for short films, New York Times’ audio stories, dance, and most recently, Ken Burns’ American Revolution. 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 and Sanna,  and a keyboard trio with Matt Glassmeyer and Brian Drye. Dana has been an artist-in-residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, an awardee of the American Composers Forum Create Commission, a recipient of a NYFA Women’s Fund Award for Media, Music and Theater and a Sundance Composer Lab Fellow. Her radio play with De Paor received a Gold Award at the 2022 New York Festivals Radio Awards. The Greenwich House Music School’s Uncharted Series presented her work in 2023 and 2024. Her 2022 release “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).”