Judith-Kate Friedman

Judith-Kate Friedman inhabits flinty places where art, activism, ritual, and Oral Tradition dance. She sings, composes, writes, performs, curates spaces, produces events, tends hearth-fires, tells stories, and celebrates 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 to restore joy, hope, vitality, and community through story and song.  She currently serves as Songwriting Works’ Creative Engagement Optimizer.

As steward of the Mythsinger Legacy Project, Judith-Kate continues in the lineage of her beloved Daniel “3D” Deardorff (1952-2019), keeping alive his music, mythtelling arts, and vision of restoring the wisdom of myth to culture and community.
She creates online and in-person readings with music and short-courses of study based in Deardorff’s essential text The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture, and Psyche, (expanded 3rd edition, Inner Traditions, 2022), weaving his mythwork and her music into wider tapestries of mythic arts. 

A student of multi-modal arts and social practice since childhood, Judith-Kate earned a B.A. with Folklore and Creative Writing concentrations from Oberlin College (OH, US) where she was mentored by poet David Young and folklorist Phyllis Gorfain.
She holds an M.A. in Poetics of Imagination from Dartington Arts School (UK) where she studied extensively with Dr. Martin Shaw.

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 and Dr. Jean Houston (leadership). She is certified as a transformational coach, facilitator, and leader from Zammit’s Institute for Woman-Centered Coaching.

Recent multi-modal work includes:

“Real People, Real Songs” 16 songs in 16 weeks, part of Cary Cooper’s Real People Real Songs Challenge. (Winter/Spring 2025)

“#91 Days of Wonder,” Nightly poetic posts (Summer 2024)

“I Am Alive Dancing,” a somatic performative memoir that affirms body, soul, and community as it unravels disability oppression and expresses grief and joy from the inside out (2023)

“The Unstoppable Stirring,” a climate-sensitive, emergent song cycle exploring kinning with the Living World and each other, to ignite love and dismantle systems of supremacy and greed amidst species extinction, threats to democracy, and war. (2022-present)

“Mandorla Rising: Reflections and Explorations into the Other Within and the Life, Work and My Life with Mythsinger Daniel Deardorff” a multi-modal mythic journey and experiential online gallery center of Deardorff’s book The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture, and Psyche. This project was Judith-Kate’s creative dissertation for the M.A. Poetics of Imagination (2021).

Composer • Performer • Author • Community Music/Arts Catalyst • Cantorial Soloist • Sound Healer
Coach • Facilitator • Consultant • Curator • Social Practice Artist • Radio DJ • Speaker • Recording Artist • Producer