Vocalist, virtuoso pianist and composer, Diamanda Galás has earned international acclaim for her highly original and politically charged performance works, as well as her memorable rendition of jazz and blues. In her early career Diamanda Galás played piano in the improvisational scene around San Diego and Los Angeles with musicians such as Bobby Bradford, Mark Dresser, Roberto Miranda, Butch Morris, and David Murray. She made her performance debut at the Festival d’Avignon in 1979, where she sang the lead role in Vinko Globokar’s opera, Un jour comme un autre, and rose to international prominence with her quadraphonic performances of Wild Women with Steak Knives (1980) and the album The Litanies of Satan (1982). Later she created the controversial Plague Mass, a requiem for those dead or dying of AIDS. In 1994, Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and Diamanda Galás sought each other out for a collaboration that resulted in the visionary rock album, The Sporting Life.

Over the past two decades, Diamanda Galás’ wide range of musical and theatrical works have included The Singer (1992), a compilation of blues and gospel standards; Vena Cana (1993), exploring AIDS dementia and clinical depression; Schrei 27 (1996), a radical solo piece for voice and ring modulators about torture in isolation; Malediction and Prayer (1998), a setting of jazz and blues as well as love and death poems by Charles Baudelaire, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Salvadoran guerrilla fighter and poet Miguel Huezo Mixco; La Serpanta Canta (2004), a greatest-hits collection from Hank Williams to Ornette Coleman; and Defixiones, Will and Testament (2004), a tribute to the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian victims of the Turkish genocides from 1914-1923.

Diamanda Galás has contributed her voice and music to movies by Francis Ford Coppola (Dracula), Oliver Stone (Natural Born Killers), Spanish/Nicaraguan filmmaker Mercedes Moncada Rodriguez (El Immortal), as well as Wes Craven, Clive Barker, Derek Jarman, Hideo Nakata, and many others. In 2005, Diamanda Galás was awarded Italy’s first Demetrio Stratos International Career Award. Her much-anticipated CD, Guilty Guilty Guilty, a compilation of tragic and homicidal love songs, was released worldwide in March 2008, and her next album You’re My Thrill is scheduled for 2009.