Biography

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

Stephen Holden of The NY Times called Hirsch “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, radio plays and written work have been presented at concert halls, museums, theaters, galleries, clubs, 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; Akademie Der Kunst in Berlin; Institute of Contemporary Art in London; HayArt Space Yerevan Armenia; SKIF Festival in St Petersburg Russia; Sonoscopia in Porto Portugal ; Messepalast in Vienna and many many more.

Awards, residencies and honors include 4 NYFA Fellowships in Music composition, New Forms, Performance and Music Sound categories; the DAAD Residency in Berlin; A Creative Capital Grant in Music Performance; 6 Residencies at Harvestworks Studio Pass; The Herb Alpert/ UCross Residency prize; residencies at YADDO ; the Montalvo Arts Residency; The John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition in 2017 ; The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists 2017 ; a NYSCA Music Commission in 2021; NYSCA Women’s Fund for Recording in 2022 and a grant in 2023 from the MediaThe Foundation to create a new interactive device for performance .

The radio version of her autobiographical work O’ Little Town of East New York was awarded 1st prize for New Radio Work at the International Media competition in Berlin.

Shelley Hirsch has improvised, collaborated and/or recorded with musicians and visual artists Christian Marclay, Hans Tammen, Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Ka Baird, Ursula Scherrer, Simon Ho, Thea Farhadian, Michael Schumacher, Michael Foster, Peter Stampfel ,Cleek Schrey, Johanna Mattrey, Anthony Coleman, Susan Hefner, Lori Goldston, Ken Filiano, Michael Evans, Fred Frith, Ikue Mori, Joke Lanz, Sarah Bernstein, Katherine Liberovskaya, Phill Niblock, Scott Kiernan, Jim Hodges, Dominika Mazurova, David Weinstein, jim staley David Simons, Eric Muzzy, Denman Maroney, Lawrence “Butch” Morris, David Watson, Hans Reichel, Martin Schuetz, Hans Koch, Stephanie Skura, Jason Hwang, Jerome Cooper, Steve McCall, Barbara Bloom, Sven Ake Johansson, Paul Lovens , Jon Rose, , Billy Martin, John Zorn, Elliot Sharp, Joel Forrester and has performed with the groups The Public Servants, X Communication, September Band , Arnold Dreyblatt’s Orchestra of Excited Strings and dozens more.

Hirsch can be seen and or heard in films by Henry Hills, Abigail Childs, Lee Sachs, Zoe Beloff, Nina Danino, Michael Smith’s Mikes Big TV Show and is the protagonist in Lili Grote’s feature length Film OranischesTor for ZDF TV Germany . She is a featured soloist in Lawrence “Butch” Morris’s Conduction for Derek Baileys 4 Part Series on Improvisation on Channel 4 British TV.

Her latest multimedia performance project “And So It Was and Was and WaAAass” premiered at Roulette in 2024 with Ka Baird, Alice Cohen, Camilla Padgitt Coles, Scott Kiernan, joanna Mattrey, Luisa Muhr, Dafna Naphtali, Marie-Claire Picher, Cleek Schrey and Lindsey Wagner and video artist Scott Kiernan.

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

Hirsch gives artist talks and leads the workshop ” explore your 1000 voices” nationally and internationally.