Rita Chiarelli is Canada’s most highly acclaimed female roots & blues artist. With a JUNO award and 4 subsequent JUNO nominations, she is known across Canada as the “Goddess of the Blues”. Chiarelli is a gifted songwriter & entertaining performer, but it is her soaring 3 octave voice that sets her apart from her peers, inspires awe & often tears in her audiences, & critics to gush. ” a voice so blue it could make the angels weep”… “a voice that can growl at her demons or soar with the angels, a gift for lyric, an ear for melody & the heart to combine them”.

Rita is also a documentary film maker. Her first award winning documentary was Music From The Big House,which took place in Angola Prison where she performed with several bands of inmates serving life sentences. She is currently working on her next documentary, Voices from a Concrete Ceiling. It was filmed in the woman’s maximum security prison in Topeka, Kansas.