About the
Festival
The Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival showcases Ukraine’s complex and unique contributions to contemporary music through performance and discussion with scholars, musicians, and composers.
Founded in 2020 by Leah Batstone, UCMF engages the intersection of new music, contemporary events, and the culture of Ukraine. Each edition expands a living archive of composers, works and performers — presented in New York City and, together with our co-organizing partner the Ukrainian Institute in Kyiv, shared with audiences worldwide.
By the Numbers
Every figure below is drawn live from the UCMF archive — the same database that powers our composer and works catalogue.
Works performed by edition
Works by type
Composers by country of origin
The archive at a glance
Our Team
UCMF is led by a volunteer board and guided by a programming advisory board of composers, scholars and performers.
Leah Batstone
Founder and Creative Director
Musicologist Leah Batstone is an Assistant Professor and Area Head of Music History at the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University. Her research examines the intersections of art music and political events in Central and Eastern Europe. She is the author of Mahler’s Nietzsche: Politics and Philosophy in the Wunderhorn Symphonies (Boydell and Brewer, 2023) and the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook to Stefania Turkevych’s Symphony No. 1.
Programming Advisory Board
Virko Baley
Advisory Board
Composer, conductor and pianist; Distinguished Professor and Composer-in-Residence at UNLV and a lifelong champion of Ukrainian contemporary music.
Mykhailo Chedryk
Advisory Board
Composer and coordinator of the Kyiv Contemporary Music Days platform; former music programme manager at the Ukrainian Institute.
Leonid Hrabovsky
Advisory Board
One of the most significant Ukrainian composers of the late 20th century; studied under Revutsky and Liatoshynsky and later Composer-in-Residence at the Ukrainian Institute of America.
Liuba Morozova
Advisory Board
Ukrainian musicologist, curator, and cultural manager. She studied music history and theory at the Reinhold Glière Kyiv Institute of Music and the Ukrainian National Academy of Music. Since 2005, she has worked as a music critic, publishing in Ukrainian, German, Danish, and Polish media. As a curator, she has collaborated with festivals and cultural initiatives including Bouquet Kyiv Stage, Book Arsenal, Odesa Classics, Donkult, and GaliciyaKult. From 2018 to 2022, she served as Artistic Director of the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra. Since 2023, she has been working as Concert and Ballet Dramaturg at Theater Altenburg Gera (Germany) and as Program Manager for Music at the Ukrainian Institute, where she develops and curates international projects dedicated to Ukrainian music.
Oksana Nesterenko
Advisory Board
Musicologist specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music and postcolonial studies. She holds a PhD in Music History and Theory from Stony Brook University, hosts a contemporary music podcast Extended Techniques, and serves on the executive board of Ukraine Decolonial Studies Network. Oksana has written and translated essays about Ukrainian music for Musicology Now, the Claquers, Muzychna Ukrayina, and other publications.
Liza Sirenko
Advisory Board
Scholar at the Graduate Center, CUNY, whose work focuses on Ukrainian music history and its wider influence.
Venues
From recital halls to the Ukrainian Museum and Carnegie Hall, UCMF has taken place across New York City — and, in 2021, streamed to the world.
Connect with us to explore Ukraine’s contemporary music.