Music

For singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Kelleigh McKenzie (pronounced "Kelly"), music is a way of knowing. After years of classical piano study as a child in rural Oregon, she took up the banjo for a theater role while majoring in acting at Carnegie Mellon University. To her surprise and delight, original songs began to bubble up and eventually became the focus of her creativity, offering avenues for deep connection with others and a lifelong path of inner exploration. In 2009, Kelleigh released the critically acclaimed album Chances which included her song Gin, winner of the Independent Music Award (IMA) for Best Americana Song. She received two additional IMA nominations (Best Americana Album and Best Cover Song for Eleanor Rigby) and won the Mountain Stage NewSong Contest, making her national live-performance radio debut on NPR's Mountain Stage shortly thereafter.

Kelleigh spent over a decade teaching hundreds of young children and their parents and caregivers the joys of music-making, empowering families to integrate musical expression into their daily lives. In recent years, she joined the SageArts team of songwriters in New York's Hudson Valley, collaborating with elders to distill their lived experience into an original song that captures the richness and meaning of their unique life. Her work with Holocaust survivor Tibor Spitz is featured in the new documentary, We Remember: Songs of Survivors, scheduled to be aired nationally on PBS in 2022.