Celeigh Cardinal
Indigenous Voices, Folk
ActiveAbout
Celeigh Cardinal is a northern Alberta singer-songwriter with Cree/Métis roots. Growing up in Grand Prairie, Alberta, she would sing every week at church service and ended up performing her first solo there at the age of four. She started performing professionally at 19. When she first started out playing music at 19, she was in a band trying to make it, and then when she was 22, she got pregnant with her son. For the past six years, after putting music on hold to focus on working and raising her son, Cardinal has continued to grow as a singer, storyteller, and artist. Growing up, she wasn't part of an Indigenous community, as her father was in foster care throughout his childhood, and because of that, she never had much of an Indigenous cultural identity. Based in Edmonton, she released an EP in 2011 before following up with her full-length debut album "Everything and Nothing at All" in 2017. Her debut album earned Indigenous Artist of the Year at the 2018 Western Canadian Music Awards and a CBC Indigenous Music Award for Best Pop Album. Her second album "Stories from a Downtown Apartment" (2019) won a JUNO Award for Indigenous Music Album of the Year in 2020 and two WCMA Awards for Songwriter of the Year and Indigenous Artist of the Year. Her third studio album "Boundless Possibilities," released on June 21, 2024, marks a turning point in her career—an odyssey through grief, the triumphant peaks of independence, and the sacred valleys of spirituality, anchored by its luminous standout track "Light of the Moon," which earned her the 2024 Songwriter of the Year award at the Western Canadian Music Awards. She is the first Indigenous radio personality on Alberta's CKUA Radio Network and the first Indigenous member of CBC Edmonton's Radio Arts Column, the In Crowd.