Michelle Shocked (born Karen Michelle Johnston; February 24, 1962) is an American singer-songwriter. Her music has entered the Billboard Hot 100, been nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album, and received an award for Folk Album of the Year at the CMJ New Music Awards.

Shocked was born Karen Michelle Johnston on February 24, 1962, in Dallas, Texas, at the Baylor University Medical Center. Her stepfather was in the US Army and the family moved from base to base, eventually settling in Gilmer, Texas. She was raised in a Mormon family. Johnston went through a punk rock phase, wearing a Mohawk hairdo and squatting in abandoned buildings in San Francisco, California.

In 1984, Johnston adopted the stage name "Michelle Shocked", a play on the expression "shell shocked", she said in a 1992 interview with Green Left Weekly: "The term 'Miss shell shocked' is a direct reference to the thousand-yard stare, which was a term that they first used to describe the victims of shell-shock in World War I. "I first used that name in 1984 at the Democratic Convention in San Francisco where I was arrested for protesting and demonstrating against corporations who contribute money to both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party campaigns."

Shocked received her first international exposure after Pete Lawrence recorded her performance on a portable tape recorder at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. Lawrence released the tape in Europe as The Texas Campfire Tapes (1986) (later released as The Texas Campfire Takes). The album's success brought major labels asking her to sign a contract. Shocked was resistant to what she saw as the machinations of the music industry, and worked to retain a degree of creative control.

Her first US success came with the release of her 1988 debut album, Short Sharp Shocked, on college radio rotations around the country, which was met with strong acclaim from listeners. The debut single, "Anchorage", charted on the Billboard Hot 100, but a follow-up single from the album, "When I Grow Up", did not chart. Short Sharp Shocked was the first album in what Shocked later described as a "trilogy" for Mercury Records.

The second album in the trilogy, Captain Swing, was released in 1989. Described by reviewer Chris Woodstra as an album of "swing and big-band music" that "no one expected", the album was promoted with the release of "On the Greener Side", whose music video is a gender-reversed parody of Robert Palmer's 1986 video for "Addicted to Love", in which topless male models performed the motions made famous by the female models in Palmer's video.

The trilogy concluded with her 1992 album, Arkansas Traveler. Her desire to have the cover portray her in blackface in tribute to the roots of the music featured on the album drew criticism and a change in the cover art. However, the album received little commercial notice, and Shocked parted ways with the label following an acrimonious lawsuit.

In 1995, Shocked contributed an original song to the soundtrack for the film Dead Man Walking called "Quality of Mercy". In 1996, she released a studio version of Kind Hearted Woman on the short-lived Private Music label.