Daniel Sheehy
Photo by Ashlee Duncan, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
Bio
As this year's Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellow, Daniel Sheehy is a cultural heritage advocate, dedicated to making the art of diverse artists more recognized and accessible.
A native of Bakersfield, California, and longtime resident of Virginia, Sheehy was recruited by Bess Lomax Hawes in 1974 to do groundbreaking field research among Mexican American musicians in California for the Smithsonian's Folklife Festival marking our nation's Bicentennial. He later was a Fulbright-Hays scholar in Veracruz, Mexico, earning his PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles. He joined the National Endowment for the Arts in 1978, working side-by-side with Lomax Hawes, who became his longtime mentor. He was instrumental in developing and sustaining the infrastructure of the folk and traditional arts field and served as director of folk and traditional arts at the NEA from 1992 to 2000.
In 2000 Sheehy became director and curator of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution. Under his leadership, Smithsonian Folkways has published more than 200 recordings, earning five Grammy awards, one Latin Grammy, and 17 nominations. Special initiatives have included the ten-volume Music of Central Asia, the African American Legacy series co-sponsored by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Tradiciones/Traditions series of signature music from Latin America and Latino USA. Sheehy also launched the ten-year Nuestra Música project with co-curator Olivia Cadaval, producing six "living exhibitions" of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. He has also served as acting director of the Smithsonian Latino Center and director of the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.
Sheehy served as co-editor (with Dale Olsen) of the 1,100-page South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean volume of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (1998). His book Mariachi Music in America: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture was published by Oxford University Press in 2006.
In 2006, the Municipio de San Juan, Puerto Rico, dedicated the Second Annual International Crafts Fair to Sheehy in recognition of his longtime support of Puerto Rican crafts-workers. He has served on the boards of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, the National Council for the Traditional Arts, the American Folklore Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the Association for Cultural Equity. Sheehy was awarded the American Folklore Society's Benjamin A. Botkin prize in 1997 for his major impact on the field of public folklore and the Américo Paredes award in 2010, recognizing a career of excellence in integrating scholarship and engagement with the people and communities one studies. Also a musician, in 1978 he co-founded Mariachi Los Amigos, the Washington, DC area's longest existing mariachi ensemble.