User:Tomhudak/Karen Jacobsen

Karen Elisabeth Jacobsen (born 23 January 1969) is an Australian singer, songwriter, piano player, voice over artist, television presenter and humanitarian and she is also known as "The GPS Girl." In 2004 she married Entertainment Production Manager Tom Hudak in Las Vegas and their son Hayden was born in 2008.

Jacobsen was born in Mackay near Australia's Great Barrier Reef and her parents Thomas and Anita Jacobsen owned and operated an equipment rental business Jayhire. Jacobsen has a younger sister, Wendy, a mother of three young children.

Early Life

Jacobsen attended North Mackay State Primary School and North Mackay State High School where she starred in the production of The Wiz as Dorothy. She studied classical piano and voice and wrote her first song "Kurly Queen" at the age of seven. Kurly Queen is now the name of her record label and publishing company.

She studied at the Queensland Conversatorium of Music in Brisbane and was awarded the Jazz Prize, and sang and performed solos with the Queensland Youth Choir, Vocal Point and Zebra Crossing.

While studying at the Conservatorium, Jacobsen began working professionally as a jingle singer at Suite Sixteen, and performed in her first piano bar residency at the Royal On The Park hotel in Brisbane. This began her successful advertising career.

Australian Career, Early Years

Moving to Sydney in 1990, Jacobsen was in the original cast of the Australian Production of Buddy, The Buddy Holly Story, and played Peggy Sue, and Miss Winter Beauty 1959, who sang the Star Spangled Banner at every performance - 220 performances in six months. She began working as a freelance voice over artist during the day and signed with Australia's top voice over agency RMK Voice Productions, and recorded voiceovers for every product imaginable. In 1994 Jacobsen starred with Jon English in "Turn The Page", a retrospective on Jon English's life touring NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland. In 1996 Jacobsen was the prize presenter and lead singer with the live band for fifteen episodes of Network Ten's wedding based game show "I Do I Do." She performed regularly on Australian television on shows such as The Midday Show, Good Morning Australia. During this time she released two albums, "By Request" and "Strong Woman" which are now out of print.

Songwriting Career

In 2000, Jacobsen released "As I Am" on her own label and moved to New York City. Her song "Supposed To Say" was chosen for the DVD of hit tv show "Dawson's Creek." She became a member of artist collective UrbanMuse and in 2003 was awarded the Abe Olman Scholarship for Excellence in Songwriting from The Songwriter's Hall of Fame. In 2002 "Being Brave" was released on the Kurly Queen label and she toured extensively in the US and to Europe. She was a guest artist and wrote the theme song for NBC's Dare To Dream 2002 - a Concert for Hope, filmed at Mohegan Sun Arena alongside Jars of Clay and Uncle Kracker. "Here In My Heart" was released in 2005 and her song "Not Enough" was featured on the NBC soap opera "Passions." She has shared the stage with Norah Jones, Cyndi Lauper, Christopher Cross, Deborah Cox and Three Dog Night. Her 2007 release "Kissing Someone Else" was named Top 25 CDs of 2007 by Indie-Music.com and was released in 2009 as "Melting Moments" in Australia.

The GPS Girl

In 2002, Jacobsen recorded a text to speech voice system with almost fifty hours in the studio to create "Australian Karen". Hers is the number one downloadable voice, in the Garmin GPS system, and also in the TomTom, Navman and Mio GPS systems. She is in many millions of cars worldwide and has appeared on Sunrise (Channel 7) and Mornings with Kerri-Anne (Channel 9).

National Anthems

Jacobsen's first performance of the Star Spangled Banner at a US sporting event was on 24 August, 2003 at Fenway Park in Boston to a capacity crowd of 34 000 people at a Boston Red Sox/Seattle Mariners ESPN Game of the Week. She has subsequently performed at major sporting events across the US including Dodgers Stadium, for the Oakland A's, Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City, the White Sox in Chicago and at Madison Square Garden for the New York Knicks and the Liberty. In November 2004, she performed at Giants Stadium at a New York Jets game to a crowd of 80 000 people. In September of 2009, she sings Advance Australia Fair at an International Rugby Union game in her home state Queensland at Suncorp Stadium, at the TriNations Wallabies Vs South Africa game.