Congratulations to our 2025/26 New Voices Curator Mentorship Program Winners, Anna Pidgorna & Haotian Yu!

Anna Pidgorna is a Ukrainian-Canadian composer, vocalist, multidisciplinary artist and producer with a sharp eye for society’s absurdities. Her work perches on the intersection between personal and political, fusing elements of classical technique with Ukrainian folk idioms and natural soundscapes. Anna travelled through Ukraine in 2012, 2013 and 2023 to record folk music and absorb the atmosphere of a country at war, the research resulting in a number of vocal and instrumental works. A passion for storytelling and opera has resulted in multiple collaborations with writer and librettist Maria Reva, including Our Trudy, commissioned and premiered by the Ad Astra Festival in Russell, Kansas in 2021, and Plaything, developed by Musique 3 Femmes and premiered at UfaFabrik in Berlin in 2022 through the Mécénat Musica Prix 3 Femmes 2020 Award. Anna is the Founder and Artistic Director of Pickle Underground, and works as General Manager at City Opera Vancouver. She holds a PhD from Princeton University, an MMus from the University of Calgary, and a BA from Mount Allison University. Photo credit: Anya Chibis

Anna Pidgorna will be curating one of our main stage concerts,
In Terra Pax on May 9, 2026.

Haotian Yu (lives and works in Berlin, Germany) is a Canadian composer. His music constructs formal systems from speculative analyses of Chinese music and related social practices.
Recent and upcoming collaborations include projects with ensemble mosaik, Freesound, Jaume Darbra Fa, and Michael Murphy. For the 2025-26 season he is the composer in residence for the International Ensemble Modern Academy (Frankfurt). Since 2018 he has served as an artistic director for the Beijing-based AIR contemporary music collective, curating new work for the ensemble’s Chinese instrumentarium.
Recognitions include a 2022-23 artist residency at the Akademie der Künste Berlin as a recipient of the Berlin Fellowship and eight SOCAN Foundation Composer Awards, including the 2023 Grand Prize.

Haotian Yu will be guest curating one of our TD Encounters events in January 2026! Stay tuned for more info.