Dana Williams

Dana Williams is an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and poet from Los Angeles. She rose to prominence in 2014 after placing fourth on the American singing competition series, Rising Star.

She is the daughter of the late David Williams, musician and songwriter best known for his thirty-year collaboration with Michael Jackson. Her father also collaborated with many other artists, including Madonna, Bryan Ferry, Earth Wind & Fire, Whitney Houston, and Mariah Carey. This proved to have a profound influence on his daughter’s passion and dedication to music; as a young girl she was inspired by the works of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Sam Cooke.

At the age of thirteen, Williams travelled to New York to attend the Master’s School where she began her instrumental studies and music theory. She quickly took up the guitar and is an accomplished contemporary as well as classical player. After graduation, she studied music and music scoring at Columbia University, before taking her studies further, graduating from Sarah Lawrence College. Throughout college Williams was an award-winning and widely published poet.

She recently finished the Leighton Meester Check in the Dark Spring Tour of 2012 as the Opening Act. Currently, she lives and performs frequently in Los Angeles. During the summer of 2012 Dana appeared in the Zoe Report’s “5 Summer Singles” and then again in Rachel Zoe’s “Summer Playlist” in Vogue UK. She recently teamed up with indie rapper Freddie Gibbs, singing on the first single, “The Hard”, from his most recent mixtape, Baby Face Kila.

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