Kristin Lems is a versatile composer, songwriter, folksinger, performing artist, and keynote speaker from Evanston, Illinois, USA. Born to an acclaimed concert pianist mother and musical Dutch immigrant father, Kristin studied music from an early age. Her early talent in writing and academics won her many awards, including a first place from Scholastic Magazines, a National Merit Scholarship, and a Hopwood Award for poetry from University of Michigan. As a teenager, Kristin picked up the guitar, like many others, and wholeheartedly joined the movement for a better world. With guitar in arms, Kristin brought her upbeat musical stage presence to nationwide events for the ERA and women's rights, safe energy, peace, racial equality, and other pressing causes.
Equally at home before vast crowds or in small living rooms, Kristin Lems has shared the stage with two First Ladies, Maya Angelou, Captain Jacques Cousteau, Gloria Steinem, Helen Caldicott, and Alan Alda, and she was featured singing a full song on Nightline. Musicians include Pete Seeger, Malvina Reynolds, Holly Near, Dan Fogelberg, Laura Love, Koko Taylor, Peter Paul and Mary, Michele Shocked, the BoDeans, and Simon Townshend, among others. New Yorker magazine called Kristin "a charmer in the most literal and least artificial sense of the word." Gloria Steinem referred to her as "a one woman argument against the notion that the women's movement doesn't have a sense of humor." The Illinois Times said, "Kristin not only has a beautiful voice, clear, crisp and forceful, but she is a very creative and thoughtful lyricist." And of Kristin's performances, The Evansville Courier said, "the performance was simple yet substantive, humorous, yet poignant, and always energetic and warm."
Kristin appears in the award-winning documentary Radical Harmonies, talking about founding the National Women's Music Festival and singing original songs. She also performs an original song in the Grammy-nominated CD anthology The Best of Broadside, on the Smithsonian/Folkways label. Another album, Born a Woman (Flying Fish/Rounder), was in the Chicago Reader's Top Ten Folk/Country albums.
Kristin's songs have been recorded by Butch Hancock, Anne Feeney, and others, and appear in documentaries and movie soundtracks, Car Talk, and especially on Dr. Demento, who regularly spins "Mammary Glands." Kristin's tribute to American farm women, "Farmer," was featured in an Ann Landers column. Kristin's songs are published in Here's to the Women, Rise up Singing, Fresh Takes, Sing Out!, Songs for Earthlings, Broadside, Rounds Galore, Pulling our Own Strings, and The Feminist Dictionary.
Awards include the "Woman of Illinois Repute" of the Illinois Women's Agenda, the President's Award of Illinois NOW, the Humanist Heroine Award of the American Humanist Association, the Freethought Heroine Award of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and the Founder's Award of the Women in the Arts Foundation, for founding the National Women's Music Festival. Kristin is also a former Fulbright Scholar.
Kristin sings for rites of passage, at libraries and in school assemblies, and has taught preschool music and general music in the schools. She enjoys a wide variety of musical activities, from conferences to coffeehouses, restaurants to rallies, birthday parties to choral events, playing music with the very young, the very old, and those in between, but especially enjoys singing for those striving to build a better world.
