Cheryl L'Hirondelle

Cheryl L'Hirondelle (also Waynohtêw, Cheryl Koprek; born September 20, 1958) is a Canadian multidisciplinary media artist, performer, and award-winning musician.

She is of Métis/Cree (non-status/treaty), French, German, and Polish descent.

Her work is tied to her cultural heritage.

She explores a Cree worldview or nêhiyawin through body, mind, emotions, and spirit; examining what it means to live in contemporary space and time.

L'Hirondelle was born in Edmonton, Alberta (amiskwaciy-wâskahikan), Canada.

Her mother's family is from Papaschase First Nation, Alberta, and they also lived at Kikino Metis settlement for several years.

L'Hirondelle's father emigrated from Germany as a young man shortly after WWII, and initially worked as an inventor for CIL and then later, in the oil industry moving the family around the western provinces to be near many of his gas plant startups.

The family eventually moved to Calgary in 1964, where she attended St. Margaret's Elementary and Junior High School.

Her last name (L'Hirondelle, her mother's maiden name) means swallow, a "migratory swift-flying songbird."

She spent a year at the Alberta College of Art from 1980-1981, and immediately afterwards attended a 2D course at the University of Calgary for one summer session.

Since the early 1980s, L'Hirondelle has performed nationally and internationally.

She has sung in a wide variety of styles ranging from punk rock to world music and choral ensembles.

Her projects include performance art, storytelling, spoken word, audio art, site-specific installations, public art, interactive projects and new media.

Her work has appeared in venues including artist-run galleries, public art galleries and museums, and festivals.

She attended the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, Ontario in 1990 and also studied voice, theory and composition privately for several years previous to that.

She also studied to be a yoga teacher through Calgary Yoga Centre and Herbalism at Wild Rose College of Natural Healing in Calgary.

In the 1990s, in Toronto, she sang with Anishnawbe Quek an intertribal women's group.

Early work such as the performance work dearth (by means of the senses), was a collaboration with Mark Dicey at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre in Alberta in 1992.

It worked to disconcert personal rituals and myths, as they perform using staging codes observed by young children who are playing at being adults (playing house) to enact family roles and tensions.

With the support of a Toronto Arts Council grant, L'Hirondelle composed four round dance songs from an urban Aboriginal perspective.

This led to her consultancy and eventual co-storyteller in residence role, along with other projects with the Meadow Lake Tribal Council.

Around 1995, she formed the duo Nikamok with Joseph Naytowhow.

She self-produced Nikamok's self-titled album in 2000, and it was nominated for a Prairie Music Awards (now known as the Western Canadian Music Awards).

L'Hirondelle was also part of the group M'Girl (pronounced ma-girl), an Aboriginal Women's Ensemble with Renae Morriseau, Sheila Maracle and Tiare Laporte.

In 2001, she performed for Prince Charles and the Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan, Lynda Haverstock, at the Prince of Wales dinner in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Her audiences have also included the Governor General of Canada Michaëlle Jean.

L'Hirondelle studied music as a child.

She first became seriously involved in musical performance as the lead singer in Vile, an all-female punk band in Calgary.

Their first album, Fusion of Two Worlds, won the 2006 Canadian Aboriginal Music Award (CAMA) for Best Female Traditional Roots Album of the Year Award.

In 2007, they won the Best Group Award.

L'Hirondelle released her first solo EP, Giveaway, in 2009.

Musicologist Brian Wright Mcleod included it in the Encyclopedia of Native Music (2nd ed.) She was also nominated for a KM Hunter Music Award in 2012.

She and Andrew Lee were part of the First Nations / Second Nature exhibit at the Audain Gallery in Vancouver in 2012.

In 2015 she graduated with an MDes in Inclusive Design, from OCAD University, receiving the OCAD University President's medal.

L'Hirondelle received another Toronto Arts Council grant in 2015, this time to return to the idea of composing using traditional song forms for Indigenous language retention.

In 2016 she became a PhD candidate with SMARTlab at University College Dublin (UCD) and where she was awarded an Irish Research Council Enterprise scholarship grant in collaboration with Irish world music group's record label Kíla Records.

She has worked on an ongoing project with incarcerated women and men in federal prisons and provincial correctional centres and with youth in municipal detention centres, entitled Why the Caged Bird Sings. In 2016, she was awarded an artistic residency at Queen's University with Dylan Robinson, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts.

His project titled "Not too few to forget: developing a public art memorial for Kingston's Prison for Women" afforded L'Hirondelle time to begin with a group of former inmates and program staff on a future song-centred memorial project.

L'Hirondelle's practice is multi- and inter-disciplinary, with a performative focus.

Her work is described as blurring the boundaries between art and activism; memory and forgetting; mind and body; and artist and the broader community.