Karmella Tsepkolenko is a renowned Ukrainian composer and laureate of the highest state award – the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine (2024), Honoured Art Worker of Ukraine (2006) and Laureate of the B. M. Liatoshynsky Prize (2001). Tsepkolenko is professor and head of the Department of Music Theory and Composition at the A. V. Nezhdanova Odessa National Music Academy. She is the secretary of the board of the National Union of Composers of Ukraine, the founder and chairperson of the board of the international public organisation association New Music – the Ukrainian Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music/ISCM, the founder and permanent artistic director of Two Days and Two Nights of New Music – an annual international festival of contemporary art (since 1995), and a participant and organiser of numerous international festivals, forums, masterclasses, and large-scale projects. She has also received grants – residencies from Heinrich Böll Foundation (Germany, 1995), DAAD (Germany, 1996), Brahms-Haus Foundation (Germany, 1996), the ArtsLink scholarship from the International Renaissance Foundation (Ukraine) and National Endowment for the Arts of the USA (New York, USA, 1996), and resident grants from the Künstlerhof Schreyahn (Germany, 1998), Worpswede Künstlerhäuser (Germany, 2000) and Die Höge (Germany, 2002, 2003). She received multi-year grants from the International Renaissance Foundation (Ukraine), the KulturKontakt Association (Austria), Pro Helvetia (Switzerland) and Ukrainian Cultural Foundation, which have supported her creative and cultural projects.
Tsepkolenko devised the innovative creative method called ‘scenario development of musical material’, which she successfully applies in her creative activity and pedagogical work, and is one of the founders of the Odessa Contemporary Composer School.
The composer’s oeuvre includes more than one hundred works (seven symphonies for large symphony orchestra, five symphonies for chamber orchestra, two concert-dramas for piano and symphony orchestra, one chamber opera, three mini-mono-operas, and one ballet, vocal and chamber work), many of which have been recorded on twelve albums and on radio around the world. Karmella Tsepkolenko’s works, which affirm high spiritual values, have gained recognition and have become landmarks for contemporary Ukrainian music.