GANNA

(UA)

There are wars that seek to erase not only lives, but memories. There are voices that resist.

GANNA is the voice of a Ukraine that resists through song: an artist who transforms ancestral songs into contemporary soundscapes, blending jazz, electronic music and improvisation. From Berlin, she brings to the world a country that is wounded but alive, where every song is also a political gesture of remembrance and hope for the future.

Born near Kyiv, in a village called Vyshnyaky, Ganna Gryniva emigrated to Germany with her family in 2002 and grew up between two realities: post-Soviet Ukraine in transition and a Western Europe that welcomed her. In the midst of war and against a backdrop of threats to Ukrainian identity, she sees herself as the guardian of a living heritage, collecting songs from villages and archives and bringing them back to life on stage with the power of a manifesto.

Ganna studied in Leipzig and at the Franz Liszt University of Music (Weimar), but it was her discovery of her country’s folklore, during research trips across various regions of Ukraine, that gave her true artistic direction. Since 2013, she has been travelling through villages, talking to traditional singers, recording stories and melodies, and collecting songs of harvest, rituals, love and mourning, building an intimate archive that fuels her creativity. In 2014, she founded the GANNA Ensemble, a Berlin-based ethno-jazz quintet for which she writes and arranges the entire repertoire.

The ensemble’s debut album, Dykyi Lys (‘Wild Fox’, 2020), presents a bold fusion of traditional songs with modern jazz and improvisation. This is followed by Home in which the concept of home is explored in relation to one’s country of origin and exile, with folk melodies serving as the central thread throughout. On Kupala 2023), released under her own name, Ganna experiments with loops, samples and electronica, moving towards folktronica, and on Utopia (2025) she takes this approach further, blending Ukrainian ritual songs with indie-pop, and echoes of the kora and African lamellophones. Her influences range from rural vocal traditions to the European jazz school, via experimental electronica and roots music from other continents.

On stage, GANNA performs both as part of an ethno-jazz quintet and in solo electro-folk performances, in which she sings and manipulates synthesizers, loops and samples live. Her voice is supple and deeply expressive, capable of ancestral melismas, intimate whispers and improvised outbursts, whilst jazz harmonies and electronic textures envelop songs about love, harvests, water spirits or mermaids. The lyrics, almost always in Ukrainian, speak of villages, fields, ghosts, stubborn grandmothers and an intense relationship with nature, sounding poetic even to those who do not understand the language.

GANNA’s music is, at once, care and a cry: it protects a threatened tradition and cries out for a country that insists on existing through art.