Maestra • For the women who make the music in the musical theater industry.

Biography

Emily Johnson-Erday (she/her) hails from the North Carolina mountains. The daughter of an old-time fiddler, Emily grew up singing hymns, ballads, and old country songs. While her music is firmly rooted in American folk and old-time music, Emily’s style shifts and grows with each story she tells.
Emily is a composer/lyricist and multi-instrumentalist and plays the guitar, banjo, and piano.
Her original folk songs were selected in 2017, 2018, and 2019 as part of the New Song Showcase at the annual Walnut Valley Festival. Emily holds a BFA in drama from UNC Greensboro and is a 2020/21 Wildacres Writers Retreat resident artist.
Emily plays rhythm guitar for the award-winning Renaissance-Faire band, The Crimson Pirates, and has played music onstage in shows with New Victory Labworks, Everyday Inferno, The Wandering Theatre Company, and Rebel Playhouse. Currently, she is composing for the new musical Soldiergirls, a two-hand anachronistic look at queer love in the barracks of the WW2 Women’s Army Corps - Check it out at Soldiergirls.org. In her free time, Emily plays D&D and tries not to kill her plants.