Yungchen Lhamo at Lotus Festival 2024

World-renowned, award-winning Tibetan singer-songwriter Yungchen Lhamo performs at the 2024 Lotus World Music & Arts Festival in Bloomington, Indiana.

Yungchen’s name, given her by a lama when she was born in Lhasa, Tibet, translates as ‘Goddess of Melody’, but she always wanted to be a nun, not a singer. In 1989 she made the dangerous, month-long 1,200-mile journey, on foot across the Himalayas, to Dharamsala in India to pursue her Buddhist practice. There, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama encouraged her to use her unique voice to promote Tibetan culture around the world. She then moved to Australia, where her first album, ‘Tibetan Prayer’, led to her being invited to sing at WOMADelaide in 1995. Later that year, the album won Australia’s equivalent of a Grammy, the ARIA Award for Best World Music Album. The album caught the attention of Peter Gabriel, who was looking for artists for his internationally focused Real World label. Gabriel brought her to the U.K., where she recorded the largely a cappella 1996 album Tibet, Tibet, which introduced her to a vast new audience just as China launched a major campaign to imprison and repress Tibetan religious leaders and cultural activists. She’s been associated with Real World ever since, and has released her fourth album on the label (and her seventh overall). She has toured more than 80 countries on all five continents.

Music is only one avenue through which Lhamo shares her beatific vision. In 2004, Yungchen established a charitable foundation to help Tibetans in need in Tibet, while today the One Drop of Kindness Foundation also supports projects in the USA, Nepal, India, and Liberia. Over the past ten years, Yungchen has spent much of her time working with homeless and mentally ill people in Upstate New York.