About Emma
Like the Colorado mountains and Iowa prairie, you'll find an expansive hopefulness in Emma's music and a quiet comfort too. Driven by metaphor, many of Emma's songs look to nature to help us understand our complex human experience. Inspired by artists such as Anaïs Mitchell, Nanci Griffith, Jewel, Kacey Musgraves, John Denver, and Joni Mitchell, Emma writes about the people and places she encounters along the way and hopes you’ll find a piece of yourself within her songs.
Emma has considered many states home over the years as her family moved around the country growing up, however, having been born in Colorado and spending a majority of her years in the front range, she feels most connected there. She began taking violin lessons at the age of five and continued through high school. From a young age she was also writing stories and singing at every possible moment. Around the age of ten, she discovered that two of her favorite things - writing and singing - could intertwin, and she’s been writing songs ever since. Over the years she has taught herself guitar and piano as well as music producing, and she has produced three full length albums of original songs.
Over the years, Emma has been recognized for her songwriting ability. In 2016, she won eTown’s Handmade Songs Competition for her original song, “Rearranged,” where acclaimed folk singer-songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov was one of the judges. She has performed at venues such as Swallow Hill Music and The Mercury Cafe in Denver, eTown Hall in Boulder, numerous small venues in Iowa, and pubs across Ireland.
Emma is devoted to using her music as a way to uplift others and amplify important issues. In high school she served as a singer/songwriter for The Songs of Love Foundation, where she wrote personalized songs for children and teens facing challenging health situations. In 2020, she launched Project Particles, a campaign raising awareness for suic*de prevention in memory of a close friend who took his life. Since 2018, Emma has run a week-long singer-songwriter camp for young girls and during the 2020-2021 school year taught songwriting lessons and an after-school music program. She loves sharing her passion for singing and songwriting in hopes to empower others to find their voice.
Emma attended Grinnell College in Iowa for undergrad and graduated in May 2023 with a degree in Multimedia Storytelling, a major she’s designed with the help of her advisors as a way to explore her love for storytelling through many different disciplines. Emma has a fierce passion for stories, believing in the power they have to bring people together and create positive change. She’s especially interested in how music can be a tool to inspire climate action and enable people to connect with the earth and each other. During a gap year she took in the middle of college due to the pandemic, she wrote and directed an original musical called Ponderosa, which explored themes of environmental justice and empowerment. As a culmination to her studies at Grinnell, for her senior thesis she wrote an album about Iowa ecosystems called Sowing Songs, looking to prairies, woodlands, and wetlands to learn from them about how to care for the earth and each other. As a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship recipient for 2023-24, Emma will be traveling the world for a year exploring how music inspires climate action and enables people to connect with the earth, their culture, and their community. Emma is eager to see where her love of music, storytelling, and nature takes her, and she’s so thankful for all the support she receives along the way.
