Home » Jazz Musicians » Shelley Hirsch

Shelley Hirsch

Born and raised in East New York Brooklyn, Vocal Artist, Performer, Composer, Storyteller, Interdisciplinary Artist Shelley Hirsch has been pushing boundaries with her unique vocal art and performance work, drawing on her life experiences, her memory, her vivid imagination for decades.

The New York Times called her "A woman of a thousand voices... She offered an enthralling demonstration of the way songs, vocal styles and language might have evolved out of more primal musical impulses".

Hirsch's multimedia performances, compositions, improvisations, electronic music pieces, sound installations, collaborations and radio plays have been presented at concert halls, museums, theaters, galleries, clubs, radio, worldwide in venues including Alice Tully Hall, Roulette, Experimental Intermedia Foundation and CBGB's in NYC; Experimenta Festival in Buenos Aires, What is Music? Festival Melbourne Australia; Beyond Innocence Festival in Kobe Japan; City of Women Festival Llubliana Slovenia; Dom Cultural Center Moscow; Akademie Der Künste Berlin; Next Festival Bratislava Slovakia; Time Festival Ghent, Belgium; Angelica Festival Bologna Italy, All Ears Festival Oslo Norway; Red House Sofia Bulgaria; Taktlos Festival Bern Switzerland; New Music America Festival Helena Montana, TBA Festival Portland Oregon, and hundreds more..

In 2018 decades of her work were acquired for the archive at The Fales Library part of NYU, for their Downtown Collection.

Other prestigious honors include The John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition 2017; The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists 2017; The Creative Capital Grant 2002; New York Foundation of the Arts in Music/Sound 2010, Multidisciplinary/ Performance 2003, Music Composition1996 and the New Forms Category 1987; Two NYSCA Grants in Vocal Music 2016 and Electronic Music in 2007; The DAAD Residency Grant in Berlin 1992 and a record six Artist in Residency Grants at Harvestworks Digital Media Center in NYC from 1985-2016.

In 2019, Hirsch was Artist in Residence at Queenslab in Queens New York.

A collection of the writing and images she produced during her Residency will be published in Summer 2019

Hirsch can be heard on over 70 recordings with several on the Tzadik, FMP, InTakt, and on Nonesuch, Sound Aspects, Tellus, Apollo, Innocent Records, Don Giovanni and many more..

She leads the workshop Explore Your 1000 Voices in NYC, nationally and internationally.

Tags

1
Live Review

Shelley Hirsch: Back with a Vengeance

Read "Shelley Hirsch: Back with a Vengeance" reviewed by John Pietaro


It took Brooklyn's Roulette performance space to break COVID-19's hold on Shelley Hirsch. Now, it seems there'll be no stopping her. The vocal acrobat, poet and performance artist was a new music original long before “downtown" moved across the East River. An original member of the avant rock band The Public Servants, Hirsch also worked her way through fringe arts circles in jny: San Francisco and then Europe before returning to her native ground in New York City. ...

Read more articles

Photos

Music

Videos

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.