Galas' piercingly beautiful multi-octave voice is an instrument whose sound defies description, penetrating like wind to the bone, resurrecting the dead in the living. She stands alone by virtue of her extraordinary technical accomplishment and her passionate commitment to the principle that the personal is the political. The themes she addresses are universal - a ferocious grieving of real and immediate loss - taking material from a wide variety of cultures and eras. The sorrow of which she sings addresses in chilling recollection, man's inhumanity to man, songs of life and death, redemption and damnation, of human pain and suffering which is experienced directly by the audience.

Raised in San Diego, California, Galas was born to Greek Orthodox parents, who always encouraged her gift for piano. Galas studied a wide range of musical forms, as well as the theatrical avant-garde, and then moved to Europe where she made her performance debut at the Festival d'Avignon in France in 1979, performing the lead in the opera, "Un Jour Comme un Autre," by composer Vinko Globokar, based upon the Amnesty International documentation of the arrest and torture of a Turkish woman for alleged treason.

Releasing her first recorded work in 1982, Galas' numerous musical and theatrical works include the pivotal "Plague Mass" (1990), the haunting mass for People with AIDS, ?Vena Cava?(1992), the solo voice and electronic work concerning AIDS dementia and clinical depression, "Schrei 27" (1996), which deals with torture in isolation, and the concerts/recordings of "Malediction and Prayer," (1998), "Judgement Day," ?Concert for the Damned,? and "The Masque of the Red Death" (1984 - 1988). "Defixiones" and ?La Serpenta Canta? (2003) mark Gal?s' fifteenth recording release. Galas is currently completing work on her forthcoming recording 'Insekta'.

The music of Diamanda Galas is currently featured in two new movies. Galas recorded new vocal improvisations for director Hideo Nakata (director of the Japanese hit film Ringu) for the motion picture RING TWO, recently released by DreamWorks.

Spanish/Nicaraguan filmmaker Mercedes Moncada Rodriguez has used Galas' music as the primary soundtrack for her film "The Immortal". Produced in Mexico, Nicaragua, Spain, New York, and the Sundance Institute, the film is centered on a group of brothers and sisters whose lives are forever changed when they are caught in the crossfire between the Contras and the Sandinistas in war-torn Nicaragua. Galas' soundtrack created the 'aural atmosphere of a horror movie, [an] unearthly tension', according to Variety magazine. The film will soon be broadcast regularly on the Sundance Channel.