Storyteller, music-maker, folklorist, and author Joseph Daniel Sobol is an artist and scholar of wide-ranging accomplishments. 

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An artist-in-residence for many years in North and South Carolina, he received a Masters in Folklore from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University.

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During his eleven years in Chicago, where he performed regularly with some of America’s top Irish traditional musicians, Joseph developed a ground-breaking four-finger technique for playing the driving rhythms and intricate ornamentation of traditional Irish and Celtic music on cittern, guitar, mandolin, and banjo. He toured the country from 1994 through 1999 with his award-winning musical theatre piece In the Deep Heart’s Core: A Mystic Cabaret, based on over 30 stunningly evocative musical settings of lyric poems by William Butler Yeats. 

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In 2000, he was appointed Coordinator of the Graduate Program in Storytelling at East Tennessee State University, where he was a tenured Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.

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As of Aug., 2017, after 17 years at ETSU Joseph has taken the post of Director of the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling Research at the University of South Wales in Cardiff, UK.

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He tours internationally as a storyteller, lecturer, teacher, composer, and virtuoso musician on cittern, guitar, and various fretted instruments.