Damian Joseph

Nothing is easy; 99 percent of people don't realise their dreams. Who's to say you are not part of the 1 percent? If you don't try, you'll never know.” – Damian McGinty

Damian McGinty personifies the idea that perseverance, hard work, dedication, and believing in yourself can take a person far. Born in a small city in Northern Ireland, Damian beat all odds and has made his way 5,000 miles around the globe to Los Angeles, where he now has an ongoing role in the international hit TV show Glee.

Damian’s singing talent was evident when he was quite young; he won his first music competition before the age of six. After winning a singing competition in 2006, Damian came to the attention of producer Sharon Browne and music director Phil Coulter, when a CD he recorded for charity was passed on to them. Damian was invited to audition for a show Sharon and Phil were developing, and was immediately cast as the youngest member of the touring group Celtic Thunder.

In late 2010, after four tours, six CDs, and five DVDs with Celtic Thunder, and having collected titles such as Billboard’s “Top World Music Act” along the way, Damian chanced upon open auditions for Glee on MySpace. On a whim, Damian rattled off a quick personal statement (“I reckon a bit of Irish in Glee wouldn’t go amiss”), made a one-minute recording of himself singing “Lean On Me,” hit “submit,” and waited. And waited. It was worth the wait. Those two minutes changed the course of Damian’s life. First he was selected as one of 83 contestants to fly to Los Angeles in January 2011 for callbacks for a show called The Glee Project. Then via Skype from his home in Derry, Damian learned he had been selected as one of the final twelve, and would appear on the Oxygen network in the summer of 2011 in the first season of the groundbreaking competition series. In the end, Damian was one of two winners of The Glee Project, each earning the prize of a seven-episode arc on Glee.