Duncan Sheik

Duncan Sheik is an American singer-songwriter, composer, and actor born on November 18, 1969, in Montclair, New Jersey. He is best known in the pop music world for his 1996 single "Barely Breathing" and in the theater world for his Tony Award-winning work on the Broadway musical Spring Awakening.

Sheik grew up splitting time between his father's home in New Jersey and his mother's home in South Carolina following his parents' divorce. His Juilliard-trained grandmother introduced him to the piano, and he subsequently took up the electric guitar, joining a cover band with high school students by the age of twelve. He graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover in 1988 and went on to study semiotics at Brown University, where he played guitar alongside fellow student Lisa Loeb. After completing his degree in 1992, he relocated to Los Angeles. He is the half-brother of Broadway actress Kacie Sheik.

Early in his professional career, Sheik performed as a guitarist for other artists, including Liz and Lisa, a duo featuring Elizabeth Mitchell and Lisa Loeb. Through a connection with fellow Brown alumna Tracee Ellis Ross, he also played on His Boy Elroy's 1993 album. His self-titled debut album arrived in 1996 and was certified gold. Its lead single, "Barely Breathing," peaked at number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remained on the chart for 55 consecutive weeks, reached number 2 on the Adult Top 40, and earned Sheik a Grammy Award nomination for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.

Sheik continued releasing studio albums throughout the late 1990s and 2000s. In 1998 he put out Humming, an experimental follow-up featuring string arrangements, and that same year contributed recordings to two tribute albums: Red Hot + Rhapsody, a George Gershwin tribute raising AIDS awareness, and Legacy: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. He collaborated with poet and writer Steven Sater on Phantom Moon, a Nick Drake-influenced album released in 2001. Daylight followed in 2002, featuring the singles "On A High" and "Half-Life." White Limousine appeared in 2006 and included companion software on a DVD-ROM allowing listeners to remix individual tracks. In 2008 Sheik served as a judge at the 7th Annual Independent Music Awards. His 2009 concept album Whisper House provided the score for a stage musical of the same name, which premiered at The Old Globe Theatre in San Diego in January 2010 following a workshop at Vassar College produced by New York Stage and Film in 2009. Sheik released Covers 80's in 2011, a collection of 1980s covers; planned concert dates in support of the album were canceled when he entered treatment for alcohol use disorder, and a remixed version of the album was issued the following year. His studio album Legerdemain was released in October 2015.

As a theatrical composer, Sheik first contributed original music to the 2002 New York Shakespeare Festival production of Twelfth Night. He composed the score for the 2004 film A Home at the End of the World and the 2005 documentary Through the Fire, the latter with Pete Miser. His most celebrated theatrical work, Spring Awakening, was written in collaboration with Steven Sater over a period of eight years. Based on Frank Wedekind's German expressionist play The Awakening of Spring, the musical premiered off-Broadway in the summer of 2006 before opening on Broadway that fall. Sheik received the 2007 Tony Award for Best Orchestrations, and he and Sater jointly won the 2007 Tony Award for Best Original Score. Spring Awakening also won the Tony Award for Best Musical and a Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album, and Sheik also received a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in 2007. The guitar he used to compose the show's songs was displayed at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

Sheik and Sater collaborated again on Alice By Heart in 2012, a musical adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland directed by Jessie Nelson with musical direction by Lance Horne. The piece was workshopped at the Royal National Theatre and commissioned by the National Theatre Connections. That same year, Sheik began composing music for a feature-film adaptation of Spring Awakening, a project that had been in development for nearly a decade. His musical adaptation of American Psycho, for which he wrote music and lyrics, opened at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2013 and subsequently transferred to Broadway in 2016. Also in 2013, Sheik composed the music for a stage adaptation of the novel Because of Winn-Dixie, with book and lyrics by Nell Benjamin, which premiered at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre and later ran at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut from July to September 2019 under the direction of John Rando. In 2015, Sheik wrote the musical thriller Noir with Kyle Jarrow, directed by Rachel Chavkin, which premiered at the Powerhouse Theater at Vassar College as part of New York Stage and Film's season. In 2016 he prepared music for the Shakespeare Theatre Company production of The Taming of the Shrew in Washington, D.C. The Secret Life of Bees, another Sheik project, was produced at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York in 2019 and at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2023.

Outside of music and theater, Sheik produced singer-songwriter Micah Green's debut album in 2000 and a follow-up in 2012. In 2000 he also wrote the foreword to The Way of Youth: Buddhist Common Sense for Handling Life's Questions by Soka Gakkai International leader Daisaku Ikeda. Sheik practices Nichiren Buddhism and is a member of the U.S. branch of Soka Gakkai International. He has a daughter with model Nora Ariffin.