Kiran Singh Sirah

Kiran Singh Sirah is an award-winning storytelling artist, folklorist, arts thought leader, and past President of the International Storytelling Center. For more than two decades, Kiran has established award-winning arts, cultural, and human rights initiatives in numerous countries. These programs have received recognition from UNESCO, the White House, the United Nations, and the European Commission. He has spoken at the Library of Congress, the Kennedy Center, the American Public Health Association, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Pentagon, the US State Department, and numerous world peace, arts, and culture assemblies.

In 2015, he was invited to the White House in support of storytelling efforts for national grassroots peacebuilding efforts. A former advisory member to UNESCO Scotland and a Rotary World Peace Fellow, he develops articles, toolkits, and talks on storytelling and creative approaches to peacebuilding in communities around the globe. Kiran has been a thought leader on projects with the Smithsonian, the League of American Orchestras, Google Arts & Culture, Dollywood, the Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation, the British Council, the Library of Congress, NASA, the National Endowments for Arts & Humanities, and special arts and peacebuilding collaborations by invitation of Yo-Yo Ma, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, and Dolly Parton.

In 2017, he was one seven people worldwide selected to receive the “Champion of Peace” award at Rotary International Day at the United Nations and was recently nominated for his work to receive a National Education Association Martin Luther King Jr. Human Rights and Civil Rights award.

Kiran is the Creative Lead for Storytelling: A Gift of Hope, a project that harnesses the art of storytelling to create healing and justice spaces to build dialogue, and change for communities, on their own terms. The initiative builds on decades of lived, researched, and tested approaches that leverages stories as humanity’s birthright to build a socially just present and future world.

Kiran also serves in advisory roles as Senior Fellow for the Alliance for Peacebuilding, USA Ambassador for Generations for Peace, Executive Board of American Folklore Society.