Born in Baltimore, Dee-Dee Darby-Duffin has been delighting audiences as a singer since she was a young girl belting out songs to please her grandmother and lady friends.  After moving to Utah after high school, singing turned into a career. She expanded from rock, pop, and R&B to singing jazz and acting after landing the lead role as Billie Holiday in Lady Day and performing to sold out shows for the Salt-Lake based Pygmalion Theater Company. People have been lining up to see her perform ever since.

In this unit, Dee-Dee Darby-Duffin talks about how her career as an artist took shape. Aside from downright hard work, she shares her candid insight on what it takes, and what it means. She believes that being a performer comes with a responsibility to speak to her captive audiences to address important social issues. But this wasn’t always the case. She had always been told to ‘stay in your lane, and just entertain.’ Once she defined what success was to her, she began to cross lanes, overcome fear, and gracefully speak her mind.