Roman Onufrijchuk was born June 6, 1950 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he lived until he was 6 years old. The family then moved to Yorkton, Saskatchewan, where he spent his early youth. Over the course of his life, Roman lived and worked variously in Saskatoon, SK and Edmonton, AB, where he worked at the University of Alberta radio station, and was the first radio host of the Ukrainian program on WorldFM. Following over 10 years in print, TV and radio, he arrived in Vancouver in 1982 to attend graduate school at SFU’s School of Communication, where he taught from 1985 to 2011. He then taught at the university in Izmir, Turkey. Roman passed away June 23, 2015.
Composer and pianist Yuriy Oliynyk (b. 1931, Ternopil, Ukraine) was born into the family of an attorney and began music lessons at an early age. During the Second World War his family fled to Austria and later Germany, before settling in Cleveland in 1950. He graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Music as a pianist in 1956 and completed a master’s degree in musicology and composition from Case Western Reserve University in 1959. Oliynyk became an active performer of piano works by Ukrainian composers and a pioneer of compositions for bandura and symphony orchestra. His output includes five bandura concertos, a piano concerto, piano sonata and other piano works.