Kamile Kapel

Kamile Kapel grew up in a freethinking, intellectual family in Vancouver, Canada. She went on to have many adventures including: working as a bike courier while studying acting in New York; earning a BA in Liberal Arts from McGill and The Evergreen State College; and joining an experimental theatre company in Seattle that later moved to New York.

In order to synthesize the chaos she found there she began writing surreal stories which she read aloud in the East Village. Then, to balance herself out, she became a Certified Rebalancer (a kind of masseuse), travelled in India, and hosted Karaoke in the Yukon.

She returned to Vancouver to attend Simon Fraser University for acting. At the end of her degree, she realized that the piano she'd been playing since she was eight made a great prop. She staged several songs as ensemble pieces for the SFU Black Box Theatre Company.

Kamile began performing in what many people perceived as a one woman show--telling impromptu stories, gonging Tibetan bells, whispering secretively and then wailing from the depths of her soul. She sang and played her piano at coffee shops, clubs and theatres in Vancouver, eliciting both laughter and tears with her confessional, comedic songs.

Kamile headed south to California where she discovered 13th Century Sufi poets Hafiz and Rumi at Harbin Hotsprings. She walked into the kitchen one day to see a yoga teacher standing in a sarong and singing out of a Hafiz book while several young men strummed on guitars.

She was so moved by the poetry that she picked up a guitar and began singing Hafiz’s poem "Old Sweet Beggar” which later became “This Path”. Inspired to work with the poetry of Rumi, Kamile set his poems to cabaret music, moody ballads, and upbeat pop tunes, creating songs that transported her to a place of deep love and connectedness.

She collaborated with world class multi-instrumentalist Joseph "Pepe" Danza in recording Kiss the Ground, an album that contains six Rumi poems, one Hafiz poem, and five of Kamile’s lyrics, all set to Kamile’s music.