Diane Edgecomb is a professional storyteller, who performs stories by embodying the characters, acting out the scenes, and integrating voice, image and movement.

She believes traditional tales and myths have the power to revitalize our daily lives and rekindle our connections to the natural world. So in her performances, she tries to bring tales and myths to life. In 1997 she founded the Living Myth Project, which puts on interactive events, workshops, and publications. She and her colleagues have performed Greek myths, for example, in the Boston subway system. She has adapted traditional European tales, from “Gawain and the Green Knight” to the Irish myth “Deirdre of the Sorrows.”

Diane has a particular interest in Kurdistan and Kurdish folktales. Dismayed that Turkish laws silence the Kurdish language, she journeyed to the mountains of Bakur (Kurdistan) to collect them. She recorded Kurdish storytellers, then published their tales in the book A Fire in My Heart.

In A Thousand Doorways, she tells the story of her journey, and the extraordinary people who shared their stories—and their lives—with her. You can watch a six-minute previous of A Thousand Doorways here.  

In this performance, Diane tells of meeting Vera Beaudin Saeedpour, founder and director of the Kurdish Library and Museum in Brooklyn (now housed at SUNY Binghamton). That story is interwoven with traditional Kurdish music by Sirvan Manhoobi (oud), Raman Osman (saz), Narimar Assadi (tombak), and Asaf Ophir (clarinet). The performance took place on January 2020, at the Ashkenaz folkhouse in Berkeley, California.

Diane also conducts workshops for students, teachers, storytellers, parents, children, and theater artists. She teaches them her approach to storytelling, combining the spoken word and singing and bringing out the participants’ expressive abilities.

She has won numerous awards, including the first national Oracle Award for Storytelling Excellence in the Northeast. She has been featured on National Public Radio, at the National Storytelling Festival, and the International Storytelling Center. Publisher’s Weekly has called her “a virtuoso of the spoken word . . . an entire cast rolled into one!”

Her website is here.