Loreena Isabel Irene McKennitt CM OM CD (born February 17, 1957) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer who writes, records, and performs world music with Celtic and Middle Eastern influences.

While in Winnipeg she discovered folk music, including fellow Canadians Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Gordon Lightfoot.

After performing at the inaugural Winnipeg Folk Festival in 1974,[4] McKennitt developed an interest in Celtic music and visited Ireland to hear it for herself.

In 1990, McKennitt provided the music for the National Film Board of Canada documentary The Burning Times, a feminist revisionist account of the Early Modern European witchcraft trials.

She and the musical team she headed would later re-record the documentary's main theme on her album The Visit under the title "Tango to Evora".

McKennitt's single "The Mummers' Dance" received airplay in North American markets during the spring of 1997, and was used as the theme song for the short-lived TV series Legacy.

Her music appeared in the movies The Santa Clause, Soldier, Jade, Holy Man, The Mists of Avalon, and Tinker Bell.

In July 1998, McKennitt's fiancé Ronald Rees, his brother Richard, and their close friend Gregory Cook drowned in a boating accident on Georgian Bay.

In 2008, McKennitt wrote and composed "To the Fairies They Draw Near" for the theme song for Disney's direct-to-video animated film Tinker Bell.

[10] In early 2008, she returned to Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios to record A Midwinter Night's Dream, an extended version of her 1995 mini-album A Winter Garden: Five Songs for the Season.

On November 30, 2012, McKennitt lent her support to Kate Winslet's Golden Hat Foundation together with Tim Janis, Sarah McLachlan, Andrea Corr, Hayley Westenra, the Sleepy Man Banjo Boys, Dawn Kenney, Jana Mashonee, Amy Petty, and a choir, along with others, performing on "The American Christmas Carol" concert at Carnegie Hall.

McKennitt is occasionally compared to Enya,[18] but McKennitt's music is more grounded in traditional and classical invocations, using literary works as sources of lyrics and springboards for interpretation such as "The Lady of Shalott" by Lord Tennyson, "Prospero's Speech" (the final soliloquy in William Shakespeare's The Tempest), the Northumbrian murder ballad "The Twa Sisters" (which inspired "The Bonny Swans" on The Mask and Mirror), "Snow" by Archibald Lampman, "Dark Night of the Soul" by St. John of the Cross, Dante's Inferno, William Blake's "Lullaby", Yeats' "The Stolen Child," "The English Ladye and the Knight" by Sir Walter Scott, and "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes.

Late in the 1990s, McKennitt created No Journey's End, a half-hour documentary, for American television in which she discussed the influences behind her music.

The English courts found that there had indeed been a breach of confidence and a misuse of McKennitt's private information, and the case set important precedents in the law of England and Wales on the privacy of public figures.