New Professor of voice in the medieval/Renaissance: Katarina Livljanić

Katarina Livljanić, singer and musicologist, specializes in medieval music and chant performance. Born on the Adriatic coast of Croatia, she decided to become a medieval music performer at a very early age, training at the Zagreb Music Conservatory before moving to France to study voice and musicology.

She is the founder and director of the ensemble Dialogos, which specializes in medieval music and musical theatre projects. Since its founding in 1997, Dialogos has been acclaimed by critics worldwide and has toured in most European countries, in the USA, Canada, North Africa and Latin America, in all the major festivals, as well as numerous radio and television broadcasts. Their CDs and DVDs have received press distinctions in international music magazines, including Diapason d'or de l'année, Choc du Monde de la musique, Goldberg 5 stars, Coup de coeur de l'académie Charles Cros).

She obtained a Ph.D. at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. She is ‘Maître de conferences’ in medieval music at the Sorbonne University in Paris. In 1998 she founded a chant performance program at the University of Limerick in Ireland. She is regularly invited as visiting lecturer or artist in residence at Harvard University (visiting lecturer in 1997, artist in residence in 2003 and Blodgett Artist in Residence in 2011) and to numerous universities in Europe, in the United States and Canada (Fondazione Cini in Venice, Zagreb National Conservatory, Boston University, Yale...) as a teacher or resident artist. With Benjamin Bagby (Sequentia), she has been awarded a Cornille Visiting Professorship at Wellesley College (USA) in 2007. She has emerged as an important international speaker on medieval music performance and publishes in journals worldwide. In 2014, she published a volume on the medieval abbey of Montecassino in the Paléographie Musicale series founded by the monks of Solesmes in 1889. In 2002 she was a guest artistic advisor at the Early Music Festival in Utrecht, Netherlands and in 2012 she was artist in residence at the Laus Polyphoniae Festival in Antwerpen, Belgium.

One of her solo projects, the musical theatre production Judith, based on the poem by the 16th-century Croatian poet Marko Marulic, has toured worldwide with more than 50 performances, including Lincoln Center in New York. As a soloist in the music of the 19th and 20th centuries, she performs in collaboration with the Croatian pianist Danijel Detoni and the composer Thierry Pecou.

For her work, she was honored in 2002 by the president of Croatia and in 2016 she was awarded the title Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

She is also active as a writer and publishes in Croatian literary reviews.

www.ensemble-dialogos.org