Lindsey Stirling

Lindsey Stirling was born on September 21, 1986, in Santa Ana, California, and grew up in Gilbert, Arizona. As a child she faced a choice between dance lessons and violin lessons and chose the violin, studying it seriously from a young age — but the pull toward movement never left. As a teenager she played in the rock band Stomp on Melvin and developed a violin-rock solo act, an early convergence of classical technique, popular rhythm, character, and stage presence that would define her later work.

She created the YouTube channel that became her creative home in 2007, using it to test ideas that fit no traditional label category: violin covers, original electronic tracks, costumes, fantasy settings, and choreography. In 2010 she reached the quarterfinals of America's Got Talent (season 5) billed as a 'hip-hop violinist.' When a judge dismissed the idea that she could dance and play at the same time, she treated the criticism as a brief rather than a verdict — returning to YouTube and methodically improving the very combination that had been questioned.

Her breakthrough came on February 23, 2012, with 'Crystallize': an original dubstep-influenced violin track filmed in an ice-castle landscape, where her traveling steps and accented gestures made the electronic pulse visible. It became one of YouTube's most-watched videos of the year. Her self-titled debut album followed in September 2012 and topped Billboard's Dance/Electronic and Classical album charts, and in 2013 her Pentatonix collaboration 'Radioactive' won Response of the Year at the first YouTube Music Awards — a reminder that collaboration and visual interpretation, not solo virtuosity alone, drove her rise.

From there she deliberately deepened her dance and scaled her live show. She competed on the web series Dance Showdown with professional dancer-choreographer Anže Škrube in 2013, and her second album, 'Shatter Me' (2014), debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and won the 2015 Billboard Music Award for Top Dance/Electronic Album. Videos like 'Master of Tides' and 'Roundtable Rival' grew her movement world from solo icon to ensemble spectacle, built with named dancers and choreographers rather than anonymous backup. In 2016 she published a candid memoir, 'The Only Pirate at the Party.'

'The Arena' (2016), a narrative dance-duet with Derek Hough, remains one of the clearest showcases of her partnered movement, and 'Brave Enough' (2016) earned a second Billboard Music Award in 2017. That year she also entered Dancing with the Stars (season 25) with Mark Ballas, working through assigned ballroom and theatrical routines under professional coaching and finishing runner-up — direct evidence of developed dance capacity, without rewriting her history as a lifetime of conservatory dance training. Her finale freestyle brought her signature question — can full choreography and live violin share one routine? — onto a mainstream dance stage.

Her later work turned albums into story worlds — 'Artemis' (2019), 'Snow Waltz' (2022), and 'Duality' (2024) — and expanded her live vocabulary into aerial apparatus, including silks and the suspended hoop (lyra), alongside flying-harness sequences. Her compositions increasingly function as movement material for others: Olympic champion Sunisa Lee chose 'Eye of the Untold Her' for her floor exercise at the 2024 Paris Games. She founded The Upside Fund, a philanthropy focused on medical-debt relief, mental-health access, and food justice, and continues to tour arenas. Her enduring contribution is precise: she made full-body movement compatible with a credible live violin performance, and turned that constraint into a signature — a dancer, choreographed movement artist, and dancing violinist whose bow and body share the same time.