Hi folks, I'm late to the party with my List Champion bio, but hope you may find this useful in matching me up with volunteer opportunities and like-minded peers under the CDSS umbrella.

Musically, I am a session organizer, performer, and touring artist both solo as Crosscurrents Music and with The Old Howard Troupe and the Gloucester Hornpipe and Clog Society, formerly with the Lingua Franca multilingual a cappella quartet. I'm a founder of Greater Boston Traditional Song organizers' group, the Boston Area Chantey and Maritime Sing (BACAMS), the Somerville (was Skellig) Pub Sings, the Northeast Chanteysings regional calendar and events map, the AFTer Hours Adult Folktale Telling series, and a member of the Folksong Society of Greater Boston. CDSS was kind enough to designate me a Local Hero for your centennial, which was a great honor.

I'm best known as a chantey singer from Mystic Sea Music Festival, Portsmouth Maritime Folk Festival, Old Songs Festival, Vermont and New Hampshire Humanities Council touring artist, and international festivals in the UK and the Netherlands. The larger a cappella community might not know that I also play treble and bass mountain dulcimer, guitar, percussion, and string bass, and am working on the concertina. I’m one of those thousand-song repertoire singers (yes, I counted) with ballads, pub songs, music hall, sacred harp, Celtic, colonial and early music, multilingual folksong, and genuinely obscure stuff. I have scholarly interests in folksong of Atlantic and French Canada, music of the Viking Age, and the work of women folksong collectors. As a living history professional, I offer a musical history series, A Woman's Way, of Voyageurs, Vikings, Pirates, and other traditional women's roles.

On the dance side, I'm a retired morris dancer and a lifelong contra, English Country, international, and Scottish dancer. I've been a member of CDSS and NEFFA since high school, when I helped found the Newton North High School Folk Dance Club. danced with the MIT and served as a Youth Volunteer at NEFFA in the 1970s. I'm an alumna of Ha'Penny and Muddy River Morris, Red Herring Morris, Oak Apple Morris, Bells of the North, and That Long Tall Sword, and the founder/Squire of the Paper Bag Mummers. We all hope my third joint replacement in ten years will get me back on the dance floor this fall, but in the meantime, song and music are a big part of my life.

Professionally, I am a certified digital business strategist and career IT professional as an enterprise architect, certified user experience designer, data management consultant, director of collaboration and content management, and visual information designer. I have hands-on enterprise design and admin experience with SalesForce, Microsoft, Google, and most major digital platforms, particularly with CRM portals like the new CDSS platform. My Master of Science is in human-environment geography and I have worked professionally as a cartographer and infographic designer, hence my interest in the events calendar and map. I’m giving conference presentations this month on Aligning Digital Strategy with Data Management and Design Thinking for Data Management, both of which I think might be germane to the CDSS platform team. I am an independent consultant and small business owner of Digital Heritage Consulting, LLC, which is an umbrella over my heritage arts, traditional music, visual design, and digital data management consulting work.

My passions as a volunteer are for mentoring young women/female-identified song leaders and for building a rich national registry and map of traditional song events. I offer a womens’ workshop with Cate Clifford on #TheFutureOfFolk, which I’d love to expand under CDSS. I hope to take a more active role as a curator and platform consultant for the events calendar and map, as well as championing Shared Weight for Song Organizers on this list and on social media. Thanks for this community leadership opportunity with CDSS.
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