One of the most influential performers of Yiddish vocal music today, appears on concert, theater, and club stages around the world. Her singing has been featured on film, radio, television and some twenty recordings including Partisans of Vilna, the only Yiddish recording ever nominated for a Grammy. She has mentored and inspired a generation of singers and bands in the burgeoning klezmer revival scene.
Ms. Cooper has performed and recorded with, among others, The Klezmatics, Hasidic New Wave, The Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band, Kapelye, and Frank London's Shekhine Big Band.
Her singing can be heard in the educational installation at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and on the museum's CD productions Remember the Children and Hidden Histories: Songs from the Kovno Ghetto.
On Valentine's Day, 1998, she debuted with Mikveh, her new all-star women's klezmer band in Obie-Award winning playwright Eve Ensler's star-studded V-Day Benefit, sharing the stage with Whoopi Goldberg, Glen Close, Winona Ryder, Susan Sarandon, Marisa Tomei, Phoebe Snow and others. At the invitation of Jewish World Service and the Jewish Community Development Fund, Ms. Cooper travels each summer to Russia to train a new generation of Jewish musicians from throughout the former Soviet territories.
For two decades, Ms. Cooper has initiated groundbreaking musical, theatrical and educational projects. As Assistant Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, she co-founded the Yiddish Folk Arts Program, popularly known as KlezKamp, the internationally recognized model for multi-generational folk art education now in its 14th year. She designed and hosted the Merkin Concert Hall's children's concert series on ethnic diversity within Jewish music. Ms. Cooper co-wrote and starred in The Memoirs of Gluckl of Hameln, presented to acclaim in New York at the legendary La Mama Annex. New York City's Jewish Museum has commissioned her to curate concert programs to accompany several of its exhibitions, most recently Chagall's Kaleidoscope, a multi-media program in French, Russian and Yiddish.
Ms. Cooper was a founding member of the Joseph Papp Yiddish Theater and veteran of its long-running Off-Broadway production, Songs of Paradise. She teaches on the faculty of the Academy of Jewish Religion and presents master classes in Yiddish Song throughout the world. Ms. Cooper was among a handful of Jewish artists selected for national artists' residencies by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. She received her musical training at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem, and holds B.A and M.A. degrees in history from Hebrew University and the University of Chicago. Ms Cooper is currently Director of Program Development for the Workmen's Circle / Arbeter Ring.