About

Amelia Ray is a writer, composer and performer who engages in barrier-breaking storytelling. The San Francisco native has performed across the States and Europe, and was selected to appear at the 2024 National Women’s Music Festival. Her performances bring to life intricate, rhythmic and emotional musical stories that are full of characters as raw, confused and contradictory as we all are.

Ray's 31-year career has spanned the fields of music, literature, performance art, film and humanitarianism. As a polyglot, Ray has spent decades contemplating how similar concepts are expressed differently linguistically across cultures. This research has permeated her versatile artistic work, which aims to improve understanding and communication between people from different backgrounds.

Her catalogue includes cross-genre and multilingual compositions like “Ana no potable,” a song in Spanish dedicated to a former mayor of Madrid, “Dream,” a tribute to musicals that sounds like it came straight from a Broadway production, and “Hambone Says” – a performance piece that uses contemporary past aesthetic to explore U.S. racial and music history, and which won the Global Film Exhibition 2024 Best Music Video award.

In 2020, Ray organised The Quarantuned Music Festival – a series of virtual music festivals benefitting artists affected by Covid-19 concert cancellations. Her essay “The Best Writing Tip: Cut with a Razor” won the 2022 Writers College My Writing Journey Competition. Ray is also the founder of Europe for Ukraine – an initiative to produce an original, multilingual composition in support of Ukraine.