Full Bio

Brooklyn-based violinist, pianist and composer Dana Lyn is a musician of diverse accomplishment. She has enjoyed a niche as a go-to instrumentalist for top artists in genres from traditional folk to indie-rock. This includes singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III hiring her to lace the old-time country of his Grammy Award-winning 2009 album High, Wide and Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project, as well as the Irish-American super-group Cherish the Ladies having her play and provide arrangements for their PBS special and live CD/DVD An Irish Homecoming. Lyn has appeared on Saturday Night Live, Late Night with David Letterman and the Conan O’Brien Show, while artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Sting, the Walkmen, D’Angelo and the Vanguard and Florence & the Machine have tapped her for recordings and concerts. But Lyn has a constant drive to experiment, whether it’s with music in the theater and the concert hall or her own recording projects. She was a key contributor to Ethan Hawke’s off-Broadway production of Clive – see her accompanying Hawke singing in character for thisNew York Times video. The edgy classical quartet Brooklyn Rider commissioned Lyn to compose Maintenance Music, a work included on their 2014 album The Brooklyn Almanac, as well as arrangements for their album with mezzo-soprano Anne-Sophie von Otter, So Many Things. She collaborates with actor-writer Vincent D’Onofrio on a project called Slim Bone Head Volt in which she sets his spoken-word journal “oddities” to music; the duo released their second album in May of 2018.

Aqualude, her first album with Mother Octopus was dubbed “the subtlest eco-disaster album ever written” by Lucid Culture. An instrumental story of the sea that is as playful as it is tuneful was released by Ropeadope Records in October, 2013. Aqualude sees Lyn joined by guitarist Jonathan Goldberger (of folk-jazz trio Surface to Air), multi-genre cellist Clara Kennedy and jazzers clarinetist Mike McGinnis and drummer Vinnie Sperrazza. The album echoes with strains of neo-folk, avant-rock and contemporary classical (listen here), but the music also works as a soundtrack to a folk-like narrative that Lyn has written, one that incorporates her extra-musical fascination with the marine world and its inhabitants.

Aqualude follows the 2011 release of The Hare Said a Prayer to the Rainbow and Followed the Fox Down the Hole, an album of traditional and original music by Lyn’s ongoing duo project with guitarist Kyle Sanna(www.danalynkylesanna.com). Sanna has worked with artists from Yo-Yo Ma and Brooklyn Rider to Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile. This was another recording where the music – tuneful dances, airs and improvised intermezzi, alternately sophisticated and full of child-like wonder – evoked a folk-like narrative. Two albums have since followed; The Great Arc, in 2015, features ten tracks of music, each an homage to an extinct or endangered animal species. The Coral Suite, released in April of 2018, furthers their investigation into environmental issues with a 50-minute through-composed set of music that depicts various events occurring in a coral reef ecosystem. Lyn also created the artwork for both of these albums, as well as hand-drawn lightboxes of corals and projections that the duo uses in live performance.

In 2009, Lyn released In Double, a duo album as Bach Reformed with Rob Moose on guitar. In Double showcases the duo’s beguiling, folk-tinged rearrangements of selections from the great unaccompanied works for solo cello and solo violin by J.S. Bach, whose music is a never-ending source of inspiration for Lyn. “I’ve loved Bach all my life – the music is so deep, emotionally and intellectually,” she says. “Whether it’s the harmonic richness or the timeless melodies or the contrapuntal aspect, Bach’s music is rich and fascinating and moving. There’s so much integrity in Bach that dealing with him on a daily level keeps you on the right path as a musician.” Lucid Culture described the album as “new interpretations of Bach that breathe fresh energy into the music while remaining impressively true to its original passion and intensity.” Lyn has also orchestrated Bach’s solo Violin Partita No. 3 for Violin tuned in GDGD and string orchestra, which received its full premiere on December 8, 2013, with Lyn as soloist with the New Orchestra of Washington.

Lyn, who is Taiwanese-American, was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley. She has been enamored of all manner of music since she was very young, from the classical works that led to her conservatory training to the rock and pop that she listened to on the radio at night despite parental protestations. After she graduated from Oberlin with a degree in violin performance, it was the informal, improvisatory feel of playing Irish folk music that diverted Lyn from a classical career toward the research and performance of traditional Irish fiddle tunes from East Clare and Galway; she has made more than 20 trips to Ireland to learn at the elbow of sage players from the older generation. Lyn has toured and recorded with Grammy Award-winning vocalist Susan McKeown, fiddlers Kevin Burke and Martin Hayes, banjoist/folklorist Mick Moloney, flutist-singer Nuala Kennedy, the late Scots folk musician Johnny Cunningham, guitarist Junji Shirota, the Green Fields of America, Cherish the Ladies and many others. Collaborating with artists such as these, she added dozens of albums to her discography, along with performing with headlining groups at NPR’s Mountain Stage, the National Folk-life Festival, Milwaukee Irish Music Festival, the Sebastopol Festival, Celtic Connections, Lotus World Music Festival, Ellnora Guitar Festival and beyond.

As a budding composer, Lyn was commissioned by the acclaimed cross-genre string quartet Brooklyn Rider to write the seven-minute work Maintenance Musicto be a part of their project A Brooklyn Almanac. Melding drones and melody, the piece was inspired by Mierle Ukeles, self-appointed Artist-in-Residence at the NYC Department of Sanitation. “I was deeply moved when I learned about Ukeles and the socio-politically conscious nature of her work – her Maintenance Manifesto and its theme of the underestimated importance of maintenance in our ecosystems, our cities and our personal lives.” Brooklyn Rider premiered Lyn’s composition at the Stillwater Music Festival in Minnesota; the group has since performed it in Chicago, Rochester, NY, Andover, MD, Washington, D.C., the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival and at Zankel Hall in New York City. Critic Rachael Sanguinetti said about the Rochester concert: “The best performance of the night was Maintenance Music… The harmonies and suspensions worked together to create a storyline that the audience enthusiastically embraced.” Brooklyn Rider also commissioned Lyn to make arrangements for the quartet to play with renowned Irish fiddler Martin Hayes – which they did live on WNYC’s New Sounds program (distributed by National Public Radio).

Lyn has performed with musicians across a host of genres – from veteran soul hit-maker Bill Withers and neo-soul singer D’Angelo to avant-Americana singer-songwriter Will Oldham, from hit Broadway composer and singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik to vintage-style jazz band Vince Giordano & the Nighthawks, among many others. In addition to her collaboration with Ethan Hawke in playing violin, piano and “musical doors” for Clive, Lyn has worked in theater at the highest levels. She was cast as an onstage musician in the Public Theater’s 2008 Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet, working with Tony Award-winning composer Mark Bennett. She also appeared as an onstage musician for productions of The Cherry Orchard and The Winter’s Tale at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of The Bridge Project directed by Academy Award-winner Sam Mendes, touring to Singapore, New Zealand, Spain and Germany in 2009. Last summer, Lyn was MD and on-stage performer in Tony Award-winning singer-songwriter/playwright Stew’s (www.stewsongs.com) new musical, Family Album, as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon in the summer of 2014. She has also contributed as an orchestral musician to the Broadway productions of Guys and Dolls, Hands on a Hardbody, The Last Ship and Finding Neverland and to the off-Broadway production of Hadestown.

Along with her spoken-word-with-music collaboration with Vincent D’Onofrio, Lyn plays in a sextet led by legendary avant cellist Hank Roberts, a trio with Kyle Sanna and pianist Matt Kanelos called The Gleaners, which released a self-titled record in 2018 on Chant Records, and 2017 MacArthur Award recipient Taylor Mac. Also ongoing is her work with noted Irish poet Louis de Paor; in 2014, she and de Paor premiered a 45- minute long performance piece entitled “One Day,” based on a seventeen-part poem of de Paor’s and Lyn’s original music and stop-action animations, as part of the Irish Arts Center “Masters in Collaboration” series. She is currently working on Mother Octopus’ sophomore project, a chamber opera inspired by the life and work of Beat era visual artist Jay Defeo.