Lila Downs Movies and Career Information

Lila Downs (born 1968 in Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca, Mexico) is a Mexican/American singer-songwriter. She performs her own compositions as well as tapping into Mexican traditional and popular music. She also incorporates indigenous Mexican influences and have recorded songs in indigenous languages such as Mixtec, Zapotec, Maya and Nahuatl and P'urhépecha. Downs is the daughter of Mixtec cabaret singer Anita Sánchez and Allen Downs, a Scottish/English-American professor of art and cinematographer from Minnesota. She grew up partly in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, partly in the U.S. state of California as a teen, and Minnesota as an adult where she graduated from the University of Minnesota in voice and anthropology. She later returned to Mexico where she learned to weave. Later, she began singing in the club scenes of Oaxaca and Philadelphia along with Paul Cohen, an American-born saxophonist. They began collaborating together on songs that would slowly evolve into Downs's subsequent recordings. Cohen went on to become both Downs' husband and her artistic director. In recent years, Downs and her band have toured widely in Mexico, South America, the US and Europe. She was also heard in the