Happiness is a renewable resource.
Creativity is how we get there.
— Judith-Kate Friedman
photo by R. David Zaslow
Welcome to Aliveness Through Arts.
As a performing songwriter, author, and coach,
I champion the creative within everyone. My songs, workshops, and programs meet you where you are.
Whether you’re a seasoned professional aching for a breakthrough, an emerging artist seeking more courage to voice your truth, or a leader who uplifts communities through the arts — I’m here to support your unique creative journey.
Everyone is born creative. We all have natural gifts, talents, and intelligence. And we all deserve, even need, a champion.
If you’ve grown disheartened, anxious or find perfectionism delaying you from your soul’s calling, I’ve been there. The good news is:
it’s never too late. As the ancient myths say: Even at the eleventh hour, help can find us
when we ask.
“It’s my joy to serve you—and communities world-wide—through song and story.
Everyone needs to be heard. Especially now.
So much becomes possible when we’re fully ourselves together.”
—Judith-Kate Friedman
This Summer:
Commission a song.
Judith-Kate will compose a song or musical mantra for you or a loved one.
Book a Concert.
On-line or in-person. Available dates include Aug 17-Oct 23, 2025 and through 2026.
Enroll in a Mythic Stories Master Class.
Treat yourself to a 3, 6, or 9-month Transformational Coaching program.
Transformational Creative Coaching — 3, 6, or 9-mos.
Re-ignite passion and purpose in your relationships with your self, your arts, your livelihood, or a close friend or beloved.
Transformational Creative Cohorts are small groups meeting weekly to support each others’ creative freedom and artistry. Sessions weave live music, soul poetry, heart-full sharing, somatic inquiry, drawing, journaling, and useful skills, with time for hands-on creative making and mutual “mastermind” style support. Judith-Kate facilitates.
Explore Your Breakthrough Year cohorts here.
Mentoring gives emerging performers, teaching artists, and young people a path to greater creative confidence and courage. Learn more about “Find/Free Your Voice, Sing/Speak your Truth” sessions and other custom packages here.
SONGS! Judith-Kate is writing new songs each week as part of Cary Cooper’s Real People Real Songs challenge. Give a listen to more than a dozen fine songwriters drop songs weekly.
A Celtic tale:
The God Lugh sought to enter into Tara, dwelling place of the Gods.
At the gates into the Other World, Tara’s denizens would say yes only to those whose talents they truly needed.
Lugh approached and beseeched, naming one of his many skills: smith, harper, poet, magician, metal-worker, historian, physician….
Each time, he was told “We already have one. We don’t need anymore.”
Yet, Lugh was unstoppable.
Again, and again he offered a different aspect of himself with no luck. Until one day, exasperated, he proclaimed his true fullness: “I am all this!”
Swiftly the Gates opened and Lugh was granted access to longed-for, long-guarded, unforeseen realms.
So it is with us, too.
Creativity opens our hearts and opens the hearts of others.
Admitting all of who we are restores us to wholeness and we become our true, amazing, and unstoppable selves.
In truth, each part of who we are matters. And everyone, those seen and unseen, are just waiting for us to claim and re-claim all of who we are.
It’s this combination of our unique skills, imperfections, gifts, and interests that makes us each like no one else on earth. And that is a very wondrous thing.
Let’s open new doors and move through the gates of what once seemed impossible, together.
With love and support for the thriving of you, your dreams, and all whom you serve.
—Judith-Kate Friedman
Judith-Kate Friedman is an award-winning composer, producer, multi-modal artist, and author.
Support for Your Creative Thriving
Your Breakthrough Year
Cohorts for Creatives Artists, dreamers, leaders, change-makers. Three cohorts to choose from: Finding Courage, Skilled Yet Thirsty, Seasoned and Still Amazed.
Individual Coaching and Mentoring
Performance breakthroughs, “Free/Find Your Voice/Vision, Speak /Sing Your Truth!,” teaching artist support and more.
Tending the Inner Nest
A creative exploration workshop
Treat your inner artist to an afternoon of creative replenishment in a zone of goodness and discovery. 2 hrs on Zoom. Sun Mar 16, 1-3pm pacific time.
Advance Registration Recommended.
Publications and Press
“A tremendous songwriter with a real gift for prose, too.”
“We never give up, although we give in
We drink the above and grow from within
We wave in the breeze
We watch you begin
And teach you to listen for what weaves and spins”
Journeying in the Marvelous.
“Life is a deep dive. Initiatory experiences happen to us all the time. The question is — will we be accompanied on our journeys or confirmed when we return?….” — Judith-Kate Friedman
Oral Tradition stories and songs have guided Judith-Kate’s sense of kinship all her life. Singing, discovering and then writing songs, ever curious about Time’s great mystery, music helped her way-find through a rocky urban childhood (and since). Fortunately, those early edgy places became teachers of courage—because, as for so many of us, courage was required. Having found that proximity to many unusual and unexpected things and people, along with causes of justice and the beauty of the Living World made her well up and sing—with joy, grief, laughter, sheer wonder….. Judith-Kate started singing for others as a child. And so it still is.
The poet William Stafford talks of a “thread” we follow.
Like the tapestry yarns in her work, and these pages, Judith-Kate has followed and found, persistent, plucky, insistent strands of confidence.
Somewhat like those young girls carry in old tales. Or the curious callings that weaves and puzzle us, offering invitations, insisting on our attention, even devotion, and sometimes granting rewards, often after traversing real dangers. Her paths have snaked through Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Western Mass., Oberlin College and Conservatory in the Ohio heartland, London, Italy, Israel, Indonesia, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and most recently deep into the quite in the remote rural Pacific Northwest she now calls home.
COMMUNITY OPPORTUNITIES:
• Songwriting Works’ is 35 years old this year! The non-profit charitable organization is poised for a renaissance. Contact us to learn about volunteer and internship opportunities and Summer 2025 Community MusicTeams.
• The Mythsinger Legacy Project (MLP) keeping alive the work and mission of Judith-Kate’s belated beloved Daniel Deardorff (1952-2019), who was a musician, songwriter, producer, mythteller, author, ritualist, and revered teacher.
She hosts StoryNights around the Virtual Hearth online on the last Wednesday of every quarter. Save these dates: March 26, June 25, Sept. 24, and December TBD.
Daniel Deardorff’s classic book: The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture and Psyche, 3rd ed. (Inner Traditions, 2022) will be explored in book group cohorts later in 2025. If you’re interested in a study group, contact us.
Elsewhere on this site:
• Judith-Kate’s podcast interviews about myth, story, and my work and life with mythsinger Daniel “3D” Deardorff.
• “Mandorla Rising” - multi-modal gallery for Judith-Kate’s M.A. Poetics of Imagination creative dissertation at Dartington Arts School, UK
• Events: subscribe to receive lo-fi missives, or follow Judith-Kate on social channels for more news.
• Judith-Kate’s poems appear in Arbella Poetry Magazine Winter 21/22 and the London Writers Salon’s Writing in Community anthology #2 (2022), #3 (2023), and #4 (forthcoming).
See you in the beauty!
Tapestry, Deer Park, Olympic Mountains, WA —Judith-Kate Friedman