Artistic Director Shira Kammen has spent well over half her life exploring the worlds of early and traditional music. A member for many years of Ensemble Alcatraz and Project Ars Nova, she has also worked with Sequentia, Hesperion XX, Anonymous 4, the Boston Camerata, the Balkan group Kitka, the King’s Noyse, the Newberry and Folger Consorts, the medieval ensembles Fortune’s Wheel and Cançioner, and the Oregon, California, and San Francisco Shakespeare Festivals.

She has performed and taught all over the world and on several U.S. rivers with her river-rafting band Class V Music. Shira happily collaborated with singer/storyteller John Fleagle for many years, and now performs with several local ensembles, an English country dance band Roguery, and most recently with Janam, an ensemble that explores a dizzying range of styles from Appalachia and Asia Minor to Eastern Europe.

She has regularly collaborated with storyteller/harpist Patrick Ball, early music singer Anne Azema, poets Jane Hirshfield and Kay Ryan, clown Jeff Raz, and many theatrical and dance companies including the California Revels and The American Repertory Ballet Company. She has worked with students in many settings, teaching summer music workshops in the woods, coaching students of early music at Yale University, Case Western, the University of Oregon at Eugene, and Boston University, and leading specialized seminars at the Fondazione Cini in Venice, Italy and the Scuola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland.

Shira can be heard on several television and movie soundtracks, and has accompanied diverse artists in recording projects, among them singers Azam Ali, Joanna Newsom, and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos.