Biographical Notes...



Mairéid Sullivan is a singer, dancer, poet, songwriter, filmmaker, independent scholar and "arts activist":
A life-long student of history and a public speaker on cultural heritage and resiliance, she is committed to cultural conservation through the arts as research curator for GlobalArtsCollective.org

Her essays & articles, reviews, and interviews have been widely published.

Recordings: Time after Time (2006), Never Drift Apart (2003), For Love's Caress -a Celtic journey (1998), Dancer (1994), and A Celtic Evening (1998), a live concert duet with Derek Bell (RIP), former harper with the Chieftains.

Mairéid grew up on a farm in the township of Bantry, West Cork, Ireland, the first of seven children. Her mother, grandmother and grand-aunt, all health practitioners, taught her traditional Irish songs from early childhood. Her father was an equestrian steeplechase horse trainer, and an 'Irish tenor' and dancer.

In her twelfth year, her family moved to San Francisco where Mairéid grew to become a choir soloist and assistant choir director, and an avid reader: a student of history and philosophy with leanings toward Buddhist perspectives.

At age twenty, she visited Australia on a holiday with her father and stayed:
She taught creative and traditional dance and singing; toured Australia as a 'traditional unaccompanied' singer; became an environment movement advocate; followed the Aussie traveller trail to Thailand where she was engaged as an English tutor to a branch of the royal family, and studied Buddhism (at Wat Pleng Vipassana) under the tutelage of UN translator Parisidu Biku; returned to Ireland in the role of current affairs researcher; discovered "Celtic heritage" and went on to write songs reflecting on humanity's heritage of joy as reflected in the spirit of ancient Celtic culture.

Throughout the 1980s, before returning full-time to her music career, in late 1991, Mairéid supported her daughter and three step-children, (and husband, while he undertook his Ph.D) via her arts marketing consultancy, for which she was awarded a Victorian Government grant in 1987. The business, which was launched in 1987 at the Victorian Art Centre by then Victorian Minister of the Arts, The Honorable Race Mathews, the Lord Mayor of Melbourne, Cr. Trevor M. Huggard, and Director of the Melbourne Theatre Company Roger Hodgman, supported City of Melbourne and Victorian Tourism Commission Cultural Tourism initiatives: The Australian Ballet, Victoria State Opera, and many festivals, including five years with Spoleto Festival, as it evolved to become The Melbourne International Festival of the Arts.

In February 1995, Mairéid travelled from Melbourne to Los Angeles to establish US distribution for her first CD, Dancer (1994) just as the World Music/Celtic genre was taking off, and stayed on until 2002, touring regularly in concert across the US and Canada. Her Dancer CD contributed to best-selling music compilations in the Celtic music genre: Hearts of Space's Celtic Twilight: Lulabies and Narada's Celtic Voices-Women of Song, which featured on Billboard's World Music Top 10 charts for nine months across 1995/96.

She recorded vocals for English composer Patrick Seymour's soundtracks:
"The Simian Line" (2000) and the documentary film "Me & Isaac Newton" (1999); Interleaf Press published Mairéid’s first poetry collection Ancient Self – Memoirs in 1997; Quarry Music Press published her book, Celtic Women in Music in 1999;
Her poems, essays and commentaries have appeared in many publications, including Celtic Tides: Traditional Music in a New Age (1998) and Celtic Café: Beyond the Craic (2015) by Martin Melhuish, and Hugh Downs’ My America (2002);

In 2000, Mairéid traveled to Ireland to film interviews with fourteen of Ireland’s leading women musicians, exploring sources of the wide variety of cultural styles in Irish music, (see short film clips on YouTube Lyrebird Channel).

Over several years, Mairéid and her spouse Ben Kettlewell have fallen in love with filmmaking. They began filming during concert tours, always allowing time to travel off the 'beaten track', and when they arrived in Australia in 2002, they set up their recording and film editing studio: Lyrebird Media – situated on the edge of the “green belt” in North East of Melbourne, where they compose music for live concerts, CDs and soundtracks, as well as produce, direct, and edit films... and get their hands into the soil in their organic veggie garden and bird sanctuary.

Their first feature film, Time after Time (2005) was the product of over two years full time editing, culminating in good reviews and selection by many international film festivals, and winner of a Best Documentary Film Award and Audience Favorite Award nomination at the 2005 Provincetown Film Festival. Time after Time was screened during the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2005 UN Conference on Climate Change in Montreal, Canada.

See more information on Maireid's earlier projects here.

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