My name is Olga Gavrina (also transliterated from Ukrainian as Olha Havrina). I am a Ukrainian musicologist, research-scientist in music, lecturer, and music teacher. My home town is Chernivtsi in Western Ukraine.
I graduated with a master’s degree from the Ukrainian National Tchaikovsky Academy of Music in 2018. Among the disciplines I studied at the Academy, my favorites were Contemporary Issues and Methods of Ethnomusicology, Fundamentals of Management in Culture and Arts, Psychology of Creativity, Modern History of World Music and the Fundaments of Electroacoustic Composition. I particularly enjoyed lecturing on the history of music for undergraduate students in the vocal department of our music academy.
Beyond the required curriculum for my Bachelor of Arts degree program, I chose to acquire bibliographic and archival skills. I researched and wrote articles about Ukrainian, American, German and Latvian composers, and presented at musicologist conferences,
From 2017 to 2021 I taught Solfeggio and the History of Music in a specialized school of art and music for children aged six to fifteen in Kyiv. During that period, I also organized concerts and lectures and participated in pedagogic conferences.
In the summer of 2019, I worked as the Social Media Manager of the international project “Musical Bridges”. As part of that project, I helped organize a charity concert by the Austrian percussionist Christoph Sietzen who performed with the Ukrainian New Era Orchestra.
I have actively participated as a volunteer in several international arts festivals since 2015, including Gogol-Fest, Kyiv Contemporary Music Days, and the international cinema festival Molodist.
As part of my citizen activism, I participated in several environmental and animal protection rallies in Kyiv.
My hobbies are playing piano, singing traditional Ukrainian folk songs, painting, piano and hiking.
I arrived in Boston in January 2022 with my husband, an IT Engineer, where I hope to pursue my music career.
I met Olga walking our dogs. I was immediately drawn to her story and status as a new resident of my town at a time when the war in Ukraine had just broken out. Olga is an impressive young woman, whose warmth, intelligence, and gentleness affected me and impressed a circle of my good friends, who initially banded together to help her support one of her friends, a cellist, who suddenly found himself as a leader of a territorial defense group in Kyiv called The Defender. We coalesced to begin to support this group, and I am continuing to appeal to friends to find ways to support various Ukrainian organizations. I had the pleasure of meeting Olga's husband attending a benefit concert for Ukraine at Harvard.