Judith-Kate Friedman

Judith-Kate Friedman inhabits flinty places where art, activism, ritual, and Oral Tradition dance. She sings, composes, writes poetry, performs, curates and produces events, tends hearth-fires, and tells stories that celebrate aliveness. 

Born in New York City, she now calls Washington State’s rural north Olympic Peninsula home.  

An award-winning vocalist and performing songwriter, Judith-Kate is a three-time National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient for her projects with Songwriting Works™ Educational Foundation, the non-profit she founded and stewards to restore joy, hope, vitality, and community through story and song. 

As founder and steward of the Mythsinger Legacy Project, Judith-Kate continues in the lineage of her beloved Daniel “3D” Deardorff (1952-2019), championing his music, mythtelling arts, and vision of restoring the wisdom of myth to culture and community. Her online and in-person readings with music and short-course master classes based in Deardorff’s essential text The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture, and Psyche, (expanded 3rd edition, Inner Traditions, 2022), weave wider tapestries of his mythwork and her music, storytelling and improvisational arts. 

A multi-modal social practice since childhood, Judith-Kate holds a B.A. with Folklore and Creative Writing concentrations from Oberlin College (OH, US) where she honed her research and writing skills as a student and mentee of poet David Young and folklorist Phyllis Gorfain. Judith-Kate earned an M.A. in Poetics of Imagination from Dartington Arts School and the U of Plymouth UK) where she studied extensively with Drs. Tracey Warr and Martin Shaw. mandorlarising.net

Judith-Kate’s creative lineage follows Deardorff, Shaw, their mentor poet Robert Bly (myth), Tamalpa Life/Arts process founder Anna Halprin (somatics), jazz vocal improvisational singer Rhiannon, cantors Richard Kaplan and Linda Hirschhorn, and Dr. Claire Zammit (leadership). She is certified as a transformational coach, facilitator, and leader by Zammit’s Institute for Woman-Centered Coaching.

Don't just ask what the world needs.
Ask what makes you come alive and then go and do it, 
because what the world needs is people
who have come alive.”

--Howard Thurman