Chloe Temtchine is an Award-Winning Singer, Songwriter, Speaker, and the creator of “Super Brave,” an interview series that features both kids and adults who are living with a chronic illness.
Chloe Temtchine: Turning Survival Into Purpose
Chloe Temtchine is an award-winning singer-songwriter, keynote speaker, performer, and creator of The Smile Tour—a U.S. hospital tour that brings music and hope to pediatric patients—and Super Brave Kids, an interview series that offers children living with serious and chronic illnesses a platform through which they can share what they have learned in order to help others—a process that, in turn, empowers them.
Long before illness became part of her story, Chloe had built her life around music.
After attending Berklee College of Music, Chloe launched a career as a full-time recording artist and songwriter. She received record-deal offers, won multiple music awards, had her original music featured in films, television shows, and major advertising campaigns. She became the voice behind national commercials, including American Express’s 100th-anniversary campaign. She appeared on national television, including The Late Show with David Letterman, with Ne-Yo, performed for members of Congress, and collaborated with acclaimed songwriters and producers, including Toby Gad (Beyoncé, John Legend, Kelly Clarkson), Guy Roche (Christina Aguilera, Cher), Pam Sheyne (Christina Aguilera), and Sacha Skarbek (James Blunt).
By 2013, Chloe had completed an album with Grammy-nominated Greg Camp of Smash Mouth and was preparing for a world tour. Her career was gaining considerable momentum.
Then everything changed.
Five years earlier, at the age of 25, Chloe had begun experiencing unexplained symptoms. After five years of misdiagnoses, she was ultimately diagnosed with two rare, fatal diseases: Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH) and Pulmonary Veno-Occlusive Disease (PVOD). In 2013, she was rushed to the emergency room due to congestive right heart failure and was told that she had very little time left.
Chloe decided to rewrite her story.
She rebuilt her life around five pillars: nutrition, exercise, mindset, creative expression, and quality time with the people she loved. For the next seven years, she lived on oxygen 24 hours a day, seven days a week, while continuing to write, record, perform, travel, and create.
She named her oxygen tank Steve Martin, covered him in stickers, dressed him in a tie, and made him part of her show. Then, as Chloe puts it, “Steve Martin (the tank ) got to meet Steve Martin (the non-tank).”
During those years, Chloe released four albums—Be Brave, Strangers, Lead Me Home, and You Save Me—and continued performing despite severe physical limitations and permanent vocal cord paralysis. “People saw me onstage, but they did not see how much recovery everything required behind the scenes. My goal was never to make people feel the weight of what I was carrying; it was to leave them feeling hopeful.”
Her song Be Brave was downloaded more than 150,000 times within its first 90 days.
Her work received numerous honors, including the Avon Award for “Best Song,” presented by Fergie; the Pulmonary Hypertension Association’s inaugural Chloe Temtchine Be Brave Award; and the Tom Lantos Innovation in Community Service Award.
She also began using her experience to help others facing serious illness and to demonstrate something she had learned firsthand: a difficult prognosis and a meaningful life are not mutually exclusive.
In 2020, Chloe’s condition deteriorated dramatically. She went into cardiac arrest, spent four days in a coma, and was placed on ECMO (life support) for 21 days. On August 5, 2020, she received a life-saving, double-lung transplant at UCLA. The surgery was performed by the remarkable Dr. Abbas Ardehali.
The transplant saved her life, but returning to the stage presented another enormous challenge.
Chloe had already lived for years with permanent left vocal cord paralysis, and complications surrounding her voice left her facing the possibility that the career she had spent her entire life building might never look the same again. She was told several times that singing was no longer possible.
She kept going and decided that if she could speak, she could find a way to sing again.
Chloe ultimately returned not only to singing, but also to performing and to speaking publicly—this time with an entirely different perspective on life, fear, possibility, and what human beings are capable of enduring.
That perspective now lies at the heart of Chloe’s keynote, which centers around one powerful question:
What If Everything Goes Right?
After years of confronting uncertainty, that question ultimately reshaped the way she approached life and became the foundation of the message she now shares with audiences.
Today, Chloe combines raw storytelling, unexpected humor, and original live music to create keynote experiences that go far beyond recounting what she survived. She offers audiences the perspective of someone who has lived through circumstances once considered “impossible,” and shares how those experiences have made her profoundly aware of the value of time, the importance of knowing one’s priorities, the necessity of courage, the power of gratitude, and of what a privilege it is to be alive.
As a speaker and performer, Chloe has worked with major organizations including Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Bloomberg Television’s C-Suite, UCLA, OneLegacy, Transplants for Children, the Pulmonary Hypertension Association, healthcare organizations, nonprofits, and corporate leadership audiences. She speaks and performs for global brands, Fortune 500 companies, C-suite leadership teams, hospitals, foundations, conferences, galas, and invitation-only events.
Her nonprofit, The Chloe Temtchine Foundation (TCTF), was created in honor of Humayra Bodhania, an eight-year-old girl who lost her battle with pulmonary hypertension and with whom Chloe formed a profound bond.
Through creative programs, music, storytelling, and direct outreach, the foundation carries Humayra’s memory forward by supporting and inspiring people living with Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension and other serious medical conditions, while helping to raise awareness of organ donation and the life-saving impact of transplantation.
Under TCTF, The Smile Tour brings live music directly to children and families in hospitals across the United States. Super Brave Kids gives children facing serious medical challenges a platform through which they can share their stories, ask questions, and pass along what they have learned in order to help others. Super Brave Conversations gives adults the opportunity to share their own experiences and lessons learned in order to help others facing similar circumstances.
Fluent in French, Spanish, and English, Chloe has spent much of her life connecting with people across cultures and audiences. She also created The Oxygen Sisters, comedic alter egos born during her years on supplemental oxygen and inspired by the observational, often self-deprecating humor that became one of her ways of navigating even the hardest circumstances. As Chloe likes to say, “There’s always a joke to be made.” Although her story is extraordinarily dramatic, Chloe herself is not. She finds levity in even the most intense of moments without ever diminishing their significance.
Chloe’s story and music have been featured in outlets including USA Today, The Huffington Post, The New York Post, LA Weekly, Daily Mail, Shoutout LA, and Digital Journal. She has appeared on programs including The Doctors on CBS, The Late Show with David Letterman, Home & Family, The Nate Berkus Show, Fearless Music on FOX 5, and KTLA. Her original music has appeared in film, television, and national advertising campaigns and has reached audiences around the world.
At the center of Chloe’s message is a belief shaped by experience: when something appears impossible, one of the most powerful shifts she has discovered is to stop asking IF it can be done and to start asking HOW it can be done. Again and again, Chloe has learned to approach seemingly insurmountable circumstances as puzzles—an approach that comes naturally to her as a songwriter. As Chloe says, “When I’m writing a song, I don’t think, ‘Shoot, I haven’t found the next lyric, chord, or melody, so I guess the song can’t be finished. I better give up. I know those pieces exist. I just have to figure out what they are and how they fit together.” Over time, Chloe began approaching the challenges in her life in much the same way: not as evidence that they could not be overcome, but as problems to be understood, worked through, and solved. In the process, she developed a practical roadmap for moving through fear, uncertainty, and limitation with greater clarity, courage, and a stronger sense of possibility. Today, she shares that roadmap with audiences, offering them a way to explore how the same shift in thinking might apply to the challenges and possibilities in their own lives.