Amelia Ray is The Interpreter – a writer, composer and performer whose performances bring to life intricate, rhythmic and emotional musical stories full of characters as raw, confused and contradictory as we all are. The San Francisco native has performed across the States and Europe, was selected to appear at the 2024 National Women’s Music Festival, and was an Art Omi: Music 2024 Musician-in-Residence.
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.