Dan Bárta (born 14 December 1969 in Karlovy Vary) is a Czech singer, lyricist and musician whose work moves above the genres of popular music. In the early 1990s he co-founded the rock band Alice, released three albums with it and established himself on the Czech music scene. During the 1990s he performed in the musicals Jesus Christ Superstar (Judas) and Evita (Che) and played briefly with the bands Die el. Eleffant!? and Sexy Dancers. Since 1994 he has been singing with the funk band J.A.R., contributing to a number of albums including the acclaimed Homo Fonkianz! and Eskalace dobra. He has also made his mark as a performer and co-writer of film songs, among them for the films Snowboarďáci, Rafťáci and Horem pádem (Up and Down).
Since 2000 his main songwriting and concert project has been the band Illustratosphere (current line-up Filip Jelínek, Miroslav Chyška, Robert Balzar, Martin Valihora), with which he has released five studio albums (Illustratosphere, Entropicture, Animage, Maratonika and Kráska a Zvířený Prach) and a live double album. He also has a long-standing collaboration with the jazz Robert Balzar Trio, with whom he recorded the albums Theyories (2010) and Jedním dechem (2022), the latter featuring Hungarian trumpeter Kornél Fekete-Kovács. Alongside these regular line-ups he pursues other concert projects and has worked with Bobby McFerrin, Dominic Miller and Richard Müller, among others; in recent years he has also been performing with the duo Lash & Grey.
He has won eleven Anděl awards, including Singer of the Quarter-Century (2015). Besides music he devotes himself to literature, photography and natural science. He is the author of the prose book Některé nevinnosti světa (2025), co-author of scientific publications on dragonflies (Atlas vážek ČR, Dragonflies of Sungai Wain), and presenter and co-author of the Czech Television documentary series Češi zachraňují (2018) and Krajina Dana Bárty (2025). At Amplión Records he appears as a guest on František Kop’s album Chillies (2022). More at danbarta.cz.
