Leader Details

Deborah Crooks Deborah Crooks is a California-based performing songwriter, writer, master birder and hawkwatcher who has released multiple collections of original music. Born and raised in Santa Cruz County, Deborah grew up surrounded by nature, but close enough to San Francisco to be influenced by the city’s history of social, musical and political upheaval. After earning a degree in Environmental Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she focused on Natural History and interned at the Predatory Bird Research Group, Crooks worked as a journalist in before continuing her education at The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado and the Ashtanga Yoga Institute in Mysore, India. Place-based, rooted in practice and informed by personal and natural history, media outlets have described her work as “imaginative, cinematic, informative and entertaining.” Along with her solo work, she co-founded the band Bay Station, contributed writing to multiple productions of Deborah Slater Dance Theater, and has penned articles, essays and fiction for a variety of publications including No Depression, The Sun, Northern Lights and “The Thinking Girl’s Guide to Enlightenment.” Her latest project, Flight Lessons,’ is a two-act, six-character folk opera based on a story about urban Peregrine Falcons and the people with whom their lives intersect.