Lydia Violet

Lydia Violet is an Iranian-Armenian-American folk multi-instrumentalist, revolutionary, culture-tender, grief-worker, and mischief-maker. With her live band, she weaves together her songwriting, folk standards, Iranian ballads, 3-part harmonies, fiddle, banjo, and collective singing into an altar of music to lay at our feet. She is the creator behind Singing the Bones, a course with Leah Song of Rising Appalachia, and a music project that brings American artists together to explore and share folk music from their ancestries, encouraging cultural revitalization and diasporic healing. She has engaged in vibrant collaborations with world-renowned artists Climbing PoeTree, Rising Appalachia, MaMuse, and Lyla June. Lydia studied dedicatedly with deep ecology elder and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy for the past 16 years, learning how we can metabolize planetary despair, anxiety, and community traumas into energy for resilience, action, and community healing. She weaves this experience deeply into her songleading and public speaking. She founded and runs The School for The Great Turning, which creates access to an education that will empower humanity's life-sustaining legacy.