Bio

Composer-keyboardist/violinist Dana Lyn has played music her entire life and is beyond grateful to not have a desk job. After graduating from a classical music conservatory with a degree in violin performance, she immersed herself in traditional Irish music and didn’t shift out of first position or read a note of sheet music for over ten years. Perhaps as a result of this, she then immersed herself in the study of harmony and counterpoint for seven years and was all about the sheet music. Since then, her life in New York City has granted her the opportunity to collaborate and perform with some wonderful humans such as Taylor Mac, Heather Christian, Hank Roberts, Stew, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio, D’Angelo, Killer Mike, Bruce Springsteen, Susan McKeown, Johnny Cunningham, Natalie Merchant, and Irish poet Louis de Paor, among others. She has written music for Brooklyn Rider, the Apple Hill String Quartet, violinist Johnny Gandelsman, violist Nicholas Cords, A Far Cry, and Palaver Strings. She currently plays in Mac’s show “Bark of Millions”, William Kentridge’s “The Great Yes, The Great No” and “The Head and the Load” and the New York production of “Hadestown.”

Dana has made nine albums as a bandleader or co-bandleader and 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. She has contributed string arrangements to Heather Christian, Rufus Wainright, Catherine Russell, Elysian Fields, Anne Sofie Von Otter and 101 Crustaceans, among others. Her own musical projects include the sextet “Mother Octopus“, collaborations with D’Onofrio and guitarist Kyle Sanna, and “Duck, People!!”, 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. 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 rigors 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).”

Dana has also made stop-motion animations 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 is also an avid reader, watcher of films, taker of long walks, and has hosted a Bach Fugue party every year since 2012.