Dr. Mick Moloney combines the careers of professional musician, folklorist, musicologist, teacher and arts presenter and advocate. He holds a Ph.D. in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught ethnomusicology, folklore and Irish studies courses at the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University and Villanova University and currently is a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University in the Irish Studies Program and the Music Dept.

In 2008, he won the Golden Dozen Award for teaching excellence at NYU. He is an accomplished singer as well as an instrumentalist and possesses a vast storehouse of songs and instrumental pieces from the Irish and Irish-American tradition. He is the author of Far From the Shamrock Shore: The Irish-American Experience in Song, published by Crown Publications/Random House in 2002 with an accompanying CD on Shanachie Records.

He has recorded and produced over sixty albums of traditional music in the United States including noted traditional musicians such as Liz Carroll, Seamus Egan, Joanie Madden, Johnny McGreevy, Joe Shannon, Ed Reavy, Jack and Charlie Coen, Mike Rafferty and scores of others. He has also worked with various recording companies in doing reissues of some the classic 78 rpm recordings of the 1920’s. He has acted as advisor for scores of festivals and concerts all over America and was director for 25 years of the Irish Week at Davis and Elkins WV – the first Irish music summer school in the USA.

He formed the group The Green Fields of America which has showcased Irish American traditional artists nationwide since 1978. He was also instrumental in forming Cherish the Ladies, the first all-woman group in the US. He has served on National Endowment for the Arts panels and tax forces and hosted three nationally syndicated series of folk music on American Public Television.

He was a performer and interviewee on the Irish Television special Bringing It All Back Home, a participant, consultant and music arranger of the PBS documentary film, Out of Ireland and a music researcher and performer on the 1998 PBS special The Irish in America: Long Journey Home.

In 1999 he was awarded the National Heritage Award from the National Endowment for the Arts – the highest official honor a traditional artist can receive in the United States. In 2013 he received The Distinguished Presidential Service Award from the President of Ireland. In 2014 received the Gradam Cheoil Award from TG4, the Irish Language TV Station in Ireland — the highest honor a traditional Irish musician can receive in Ireland. His latest two internationally acclaimed CD’s McNally’s Row of Flats and If It Wasn’t For the Irish and the Jews, explore songs of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century popular stage in America and were both granted the prestigious Livies award for best CD of the year.