Karan Casey
Singer | Songwriter
Karan Casey Biography Irish singer-songwriter Karan Casey has been making her mark for over 30 years. A passionate lover of ballads, love songs, and powerful social justice anthems, Karan enjoys sharing meaningful stories with her audience, connecting through Ireland’s past while recontextualizing women's roles in a universal and contemporary setting. Recently, she has ventured into new performance areas, incorporating piano, spoken word, and theatre into her artistry.
Karan Casey
Karan has released eleven albums and contributed to numerous projects, appearing on more than 80 albums to date. She has toured extensively across North America, Europe, and Japan, performing both with her own band and collaborating with a diverse range of musicians, including Maura O'Connell, James Taylor, Bela Fleck, the Boston Pops Orchestra, Kate Ellis, Niall Vallely, Pauline Scanlon, The Chieftains, The Dubliners, Peggy Seeger, Karen Matheson, Mick Flannery, Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, Tim O'Brien, and Solas.
In 2018, Karan helped to establish FairPlé, an organization committed to achieving fairness and gender balance for female performers in Irish traditional and folk music.
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Karan tours with her band, which includes Niamh Dunne, Sean Óg Graham, and Niall Vallely. Her album "Hieroglyphs That Tell the Tale," produced by Donald Shaw, was released under the Vertical Records label, and her song "Down in the Glen" was nominated for Best Original Folk Song at the RTÉ Folk Awards in 2019. She earned her PhD in music from the University of Limerick in 2019. Karan's first theater show, "I Walked into My Head," directed by Sophie Motley, premiered at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2021.
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In 2022, she collaborated with composer Harry Escott to create a version of the Irish ballad "Grace" for the film "Ali & Ava." Her latest album, "Nine Apples of Gold," was released to widespread acclaim in February 2023, reaching No. 1 on the US Folk Radio charts for March. Karan’s new stage show, "The Women We Will Rise," which focuses on women during the Irish revolutionary period, premiered at the Everyman Theatre in Cork in September 2023.