Lourdes Pérez

Her discography includes 13 CDs, a full-length film score, a short film score, 2 modern dance scores, a theater score and numerous individual tributes, while her songs appear in films, CD compilations and anthologies. A concert at a Palestinian refugee camp prompted her Spanish translation of the Arabic song by Ahmad Kaabour/Tawfeeq Zayad, "Unadeekum (Te llamo)", which was later released on her CD, Este Filo. A song that Pérez wrote for the people of Sierra Blanca, Texas was read into the U.S. Congressional record by Rep. Lloyd Doggett (Texas) as part of a successful campaign against dumping nuclear waste inside a low-income Mexican American community on the Texas-Mexico border. References to her strong support for the independence of Puerto Rico can be found in several of her songs. In November 2006, her song, "Paloma Urbana" (Urban Dove) won Best Latin Song in the Just Plain Folks Music Awards. Over the years, she has been asked to write or improvise tributes to other artists, human rights leaders and elders, such as Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa, Puerto Rican nationalist centenarian Isabel Rosado and disappeared Mayan resistance leader Efraín Bámaca Velásquez ("Comandante Everardo"). Pérez recently provided contextual information on Puerto Rican poetry for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's memoir, My Beloved World (2013).

Lourdes Pérez was honored, alongside Ali Akbar Khan, as one of the country's "finest living artists" and was awarded a 2006 United States Artists unrestricted fellowship for her contribution to music.

Pérez is openly lesbian, and has written songs about lesbian experience. "Yo Pari Una Luchadora" (I Gave Birth to a Fighter) is a song dedicated to the mother of a lesbian human rights activist. Perez has lived and traveled with her partner and collaborator, Annette D'Armata, since 1991.

Lourdes Pérez (born Bernardita de Lourdes Pérez Cruz on February 12, 1961) is a prolific Puerto Rican contemporary recording artist, songwriter, composer, arranger, poet, contralto vocalist, oral historian and guitarist. She is also one of few female decimistas (writer of décima, a specialized form of Spanish poetry). Often conjuring comparisons to the soulful world music genres of cante jonde, morna and fado, Pérez' body of music has been characterized as folk opera ("opera of the people") that honors her jíbara (Puerto Rican mountain) roots and the legacy of Spanish/pan-Latin American nueva trova or nueva cancion.