Professional Background
Olga Zaitseva-Herz is an ethnomusicologist and musicologist and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Kule Centre for Ukrainian and Canadian Folklore at the University of Alberta, where she received her PhD in music. Dr. Zaitseva-Herz also holds a degree in violin from the Dnipro Music Conservatory in Ukraine, a diploma in music pedagogy from the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts, Wiesbaden Music Academy, and a bachelor's degree in sound design from the Kyiv National Karpenko-Karyi University of Theatre, Cinema and Television in Ukraine
Dr. Zaitseva-Herz’s research focuses on how songs preserve memory, communicate identity, and negotiate cultural and historical experience. She has extensive experience working with klezmer music and Jewish songs in Ukraine and is particularly interested in how music represents testimony, memory, and cultural life amid periods of violence, displacement, and rupture. Her work also examines AI-generated songs on social media and the ways they are instrumentalized in antisemitic campaigns, Holocaust denial and distortion, and right-wing political messaging.
Dr. Zaitseva-Herz’s research has received multiple awards, including a GEMA Scholarship for the Study of Klezmer Songs of Ukraine, an Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship, and a 2025–2026 Non-Residential Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation, where she studied the role of music and sounds during the Holocaust in Ukraine.
Dr. Zaitseva-Herz is also a composer and singer whose projects bring together archival materials, scholarship, and musical practice. In 2024, she premiered her contemporary opera Bakhmut Rhapsody in New York City at the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival, a work that incorporated documentary material and sound fieldwork.
Fellowship Research
While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Fred and Maria Devinki Memorial Fellow, Olga Zaitseva-Herz will work with the Beregovsky Collection, a rare archive of Jewish songs, musical manuscripts, and ethnographic materials from Ukraine. Her project will focus on some of the least explored parts of the collection to examine how these materials preserve traces of Jewish cultural life, Holocaust memory, survival, and postwar transmission through song.
Residency Period: January 1, 2027 – August 31, 2027