Cumbrian born Jess Dandy is the foremost British contralto of her generation and has been praised for her instrument of velvety plangent timbre, and her artistic remarkable immediacy. She studied Modern and Medieval Languages at Trinity College, Cambridge and the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, and is an alumna and Fellow of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Jess Dandy has appeared on the concert platform with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, The English Concert, The Academy of Ancient Music, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Bergen Philharmonic, Tampere Philharmonic, Orchestre révolutionnaire et romantique, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Symphony Orchestra, Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, Salzburg Kulturvereinigung, BBC National Orchestra & Chorus of Wales, Welsh National Opera, The Dunedin Consort, Les Arts Florissant, Opera Settecento, Hallé Orchestra, Britten Sinfonia and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic; collaborating with conductors including Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Harry Bicket, Laurence Cummings, Osmo Vänskä, Trevor Pinnock, Gemma New, John Butt William Christie, Kristian Bezuidenhout and Stephen Layton.

She finds a natural habitat on the recital platform and enjoys working with a range of pianists, including Martin Roscoe, Dylan Perez, Malcolm Martineau, Chris Glynn, James Baillieu, Julius Drake, Gary Matthewman, Keval Shah, Ian Tindale, Sholto Kynoch, Anthony Hewitt, Gavin Roberts, Iain Burnside, Simon Lepper, Huw Watkins and Wolfram Rieger. She appears regularly at Wigmore Hall and Oxford International Song Festival amongst others.

In 2021, she was shortlisted for a Royal Philharmonic Society Award in the category of Young Artist. She is a multi-faceted artist with a keen interest in ecology, body psychology and spirituality. She is the co-founder of SongPath, a mental health initiative creating musical walking trails in nature for better mental health. With composer Alex Mills, she developed the Music & Being Collective, an open laboratory space exploring music and our sense of self through interdisciplinary dialogue.