Diane Daly is a violinist, educator, and researcher. As a performer, she made her debut in Ireland as a soloist with the RTE Symphony Orchestra at the age of 12. She has played principal with all the Irish orchestras and toured internationally with ensembles including the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, The European Union Chamber Orchestra, Camerata Ireland. She has been a member of the Irish Chamber Orchestra since 1998.

She has appeared as a chamber musician at festivals including West Cork, Kilkenny, Heidelberg and Aldeburgh. She is in demand as a soloist and was due to tour Brazil and Chile in 2020 before Covid-19 intervened. In other genres she has performed and recorded alongside many of the biggest names in rock and leads her own gypsy jazz trio that is a regular fixture at festivals. Diane is a qualified Dalcroze researcher and teacher and for many years ran a parallel career as educator, incorporating Dalcroze approaches into instrumental teaching.

In 2015, she brought the two strands of her career together when she embarked upon an Arts Practice PhD investigating the influence of Dalcroze techniques on her professional performance practice. From this research emerged a number of insights and new approaches that became Creative Embodied String Performance (CESP). This incorporates fresh approaches to devising, preparing and performing repertoire. Her research was funded by the Irish Research Council and in 2021 received the inaugural Aloys Fleischmann award for outstanding performance-based research.

Diane has been the course director of the MA in Classical Strings at the University of Limerick since 2017, and from this base is developing a number of exciting and innovative research projects both in Ireland and across Europe that develop the concepts of embodiment, presence, creativity and connection. In 2020 Diane became the first certified Body Mapping String Player in Europe.