Dana Lyn & Kyle Sanna

“Fiddler Dana Lyn and guitarist Kyle Sanna are first-rate, versatile musicians and also concerned environmentalists” – The New Yorker

“Ground-breaking” – folklorist Mick Moloney

“Bursting with creativity” – fiddler Kevin Burke

“Dana Lyn and Kyle Sanna have figured out how to express Irish music as a truly universal music language.” – fiddler Martin Hayes

Hailed as “first-rate, versatile musicians” by The New Yorker and “a top-notch fiddle-and-guitar duo” by The New York Times, Dana Lyn and Kyle Sanna connect the dots between their experience as composers and improvisers in New York City’s rich musical community and their deep admiration for traditional Irish music. Rooted in this tradition, the branches of Lyn and Sanna’s collaboration extend to include projected animations, augmented reality, dance, video, and orchestral compositions. The duo has collaborated with some of the greatest interpreters of Irish music, including Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill, Cillian Vallely, Kevin Burke, and Mick McAuley, and with choreographers Darrah Carr Byrne and Seán Curran. They have received commissions from New York’s Irish Arts Center and from Palaver Strings. Their projects “The Great Arc”, “The Coral Suite”, and “Under the Sea-Wind” are focused on themes of environmental fragility.

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Brooklyn-based visual artist and composer Dana Lyn has performed with Tony Award-winning songwriters Stew and Heidi Rodewald, actor-directors Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio, 2017 MacArthur Fellow Taylor Mac, D’Angelo, Bruce Springsteen, Natalie Merchant, and Irish poet Louis de Paor, among others. She has received commissions from Brooklyn Rider, the National Arts Council of Ireland, the Apple Hill String Quartet, violinist Johnny Gandelsman, violist Nicholas Cords, A Far Cry, Palaver Strings and the New Orchestra of Washington. Her theater credits include the Public Theater’s production of Hamlet (Shakespeare in the Park, 2008); The Cherry Orchard and The Winter’s Tale (The Bridge Project at BAM, 2009), Clive, (The New Group, 2013); Family Album (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2014). She currently plays in the band of the Tony and Grammy Award-winning musical, Hadestown.

She has made eight albums as a bandleader or co-bandleader and has created album art for five of them; she has made stop-motion animated music videos for her own music as well as 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 players Ben Goldberg and Mike McGinnis. She has written music for short films, New York Times’ audio stories and for dance. Her contributions to the Ken Burns documentary American Holocaust were called “sublime” by The Boston Globe. Dana is also a well-versed fiddle player in the Irish tradition (that is a whole other story).

Her own musical projects include the sextet “Mother Octopus“, her aforementioned collaborations with D’Onofrio, Sanna, and De Paor, and a string trio with cellist Marika Hughes and violinist Charlie Burnham. She performs with Taylor Mac’s 24 Decades of Popular Music in 24 Hours and Holiday Sauce, “Notes of a Native Song” by Stew and the Negro Problem, and the Hank Roberts Sextet. Dana was an artist-in-residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in the Spring of 2017, a member of the Joe’s Pub Working Group in 2018, and an awardee of the American Composers Forum Create Commission, also in 2018. Most recently, she was a recipient of a 2020 NYFA Women’s Fund Award for Media, Music and Theater and a Sundance Composer Lab Fellow in 2021, and her radio play with De Paor received a Gold Award at the 2022 New York Festivals Radio Awards. Her recently released album “A Point on a Slow Curve (In-a-Circle Records)” is a suite of music for septet and four voices; “brilliantly capturing the rigours 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).”

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