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Olena Hlibowych was the artistic director of Verkhovyna Vocal Ensemble from its inception in 1952.

Edward Kozak was born 26 January 1902, in Hirne, Stryi county, Galicia. Caricaturist, illustrator, and painter; feuilletonist, satirist, writer, and editor. He studies at the Vienna Art School (1917) and O. Novakivsky's art school in Lviv (1926), illustrated and edited the satirical periodical Zyz (1926-1933) and Komar (1933-1939) in Lviv, and illustrated the children's magazines Svit dytyny, Dzvinochok (1931-1939), and Iuni druzi (1933-1934) and the books published by I. Tyktor. At the same time, he painted and participated in the exhibitions of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists (1933-6) in Lviv.

Emigrating to Germany at the end of the Second World War, he founded the humor magazine Lys Mykyta (1948) and headed the Ukrainian Association of Artists (USOM). In 1949 he settled in the United States, where he worked in animated television films, receiving an award for his work from the National Educational Association in 1957. He resumed publishing Lys Mykyta in 1951, and exhibited his paintings in Detroit, Chicago, Buffalo, Toronto, Edmonton, and Hunter (New York). For a time he illustrated the children's magazine Veselka.

Kozak is best known for his satirical drawings and writings, which amount to a running commentary on political and social developments in the Ukrainian community for over half a century. His caricatures of J. Stalin, which were reprinted in the German, French, Italian, English, Dutch, Polish, and Yugoslavian press, are recognized classics in the field. Many of his paintings deal with folk motifs and display a light-hearted humor and expressive colors; eg, The Market, Sich, Old Inn, and Village. He has published two albums of drawings with witty captions: Selo (The Village, 1949) and EKO (1949). As a satirical writer, he has created the incisive peasant philosopher Hryts Zozulia, under whose name he has published two collections of humorous sketches: Hryts' Zozulia (1973) and Na khlops'kyi rozum Hrytsia Zozuli (According to Hryts Zozulia's Common Sense, 1982). He has written numerous feuilletons and verses under different pen names. Some of the verses are printed in the collection Virshi ironichni, satyrychni i komichni (Ironic, Satiric, and Comic Verses, 1959).

Born and raised in Edmonton, Orest Soltykevych started his musical career having completed Royal Conservatory Piano up to the Grade 9 level. He continued his musical studies at the University of Alberta, and completed his Bachelor of Education with a major in secondary music.

Orest has been active with Ukrainian choirs since the age of 15, when he first accompanied the Ukrainian Youth Association of Canada (CYMK) Choir. He then joined that choir as a singer, and also sang in and accompanied the Dnipro Choir.

In 1984, Orest became the founding conductor of the Ukrainian Male Chorus of Edmonton, and continues to be its artistic director to this day. In 1986, Orest became the conductor of the Ukrainian Youth Association of Canada (CYMK) Choir, and led that ensemble for seven years. Orest was also conductor of the St Andrew's Ukrainian Orthodox Parish Choir for three years. As well, for the past five years, Orest has been the conductor of the Verkhovyna Choir

In recent years, Orest has sung with the Richard Eaton Singers, the Da Camera Singers, and the Kappella Kyrie Slavic Chamber Choir.

Orest served as a member and later as president of the Ukrainian Music Society for ten years. In 1999, he founded the radio program "Sounds Ukrainian" on radio station CJSR at the University of Alberta, and hosted the program for seven years. Currently, Orest hosts the classical music programs Saturday Breakfast and Sunday Breakfast on the CKUA Radio Network, which broadcasts throughout Alberta.

Five years ago, Orest retired from Edmonton Public Schools after 32 years of teaching and administration.

Dr. Bohdan Medwidsky was on the committee for Graham's dissertation.

Larysa Saban is a folklorist and a researcher at the Mykola Lysenko Music Institute in L'viv, Ukraine. She studies folk music and dances. From 1980 and on, Larysa conducted a lot of fieldwork in western part of Ukraine.

Anne Elias was born in 1921 in a Ukrainian family on a farm near Two Hills, Alberta.

Wadym Dobrolige was born on December 7, 1913 in Nizhyn, Chernihiv region of the present day Ukraine. He was an artist and decorator. He graduated from the Kyiv Art Institute in 1935, and also studied at the Leningrad Institute of Sculpture and Architecture (1936). After coming back to Kyiv, he worked as a book illustrator. He was arrested, sent to Kolyma in Khabarovsk region of Russia, and was released in 1938. He worked as a film decorator under the supervision of Oleksandr Dovzhenko. During WWII he was captured by the Germans. In 1942 he fled the concentration camp and returned to Kyiv where he worked as a mechanic. However, Wadym Dobrolige was taken by the Germans to Germany and ended up at a DP camp Heidenau near Hamburg where he organized an art studio. There he created over 20 portraits, three icons for the camp church, peisages, still lifes, and decorated most of the camp plays for the Ukrainian theatre.

In 1948, Dobrolige moved to Canada. He painted many icons and Iconostasis. He created the iconostasis for the St. John's Cathedral in Edmonton in baroque style. A lot of Orthodox churches mainly in Alberta, but also in Saskatchewan and Quebec have Dobrolige’s Iconostasis, icons and church paintings. He decorated multiple theatre performances, created numerous portraits and still lifes, posters, external and internal decorations. Wadym Dobrolige was responsible for creating the portrait of Princess Elizabeth and different decorations for the procession to honour her visit to Edmonton in 1951. He died on October 4, 1973 in Edmonton, Alberta.

Composer, conductor and music critic Mykola Fomenko (b. 1894, Rostov-on-Don, Russia, d. 1961, New York, USA) was raised in a large family by a widowed father, who encouraged his son to pursue a “practical” profession. Fomenko began studying piano only at age 17. During the First World War he fought in the Caucasus. In 1929 he graduated from the Kharkiv Conservatory, where he studied composition and conducting. He was music director and conductor of the Kharkiv Music and Drama Theatre, until he was dismissed for refusing the join the Communist Party. Subsequently he worked at the Mystetstvo publishing house. Following the Second World War he was a displaced person in Europe until he immigrated to the United States in 1951. There he taught at the Ukrainian Music Institute of America in New York and worked for the Ukrainian section of Voice of America.

His output as a composer consists of more than 100 works, including two symphonies, a piano concerto, chamber works for strings, solo piano pieces, several operas, incidental music, choral works and art songs.

Composer Wasyl Bezkorowajnyj (b. 1880, Ternopil, Ukraine, d. 1966, Buffalo, USA) was born into a middle-class family and was exposed to music in childhood through singing in a church choir and playing the organ. He studied at the Ternopil Gymnasium, Ternopil Teacher’s Seminary and the Lviv Conservatory. He worked with the Boyan Choral Society in Ternopil, Lviv and Stanislav, organized branches of the Lysenko Music Institute in Ternopil and Zolochiv, and worked as music director of the Ukrainian Discourse Theatre. In 1944 he migrated to Austria, then Bohemia, and in 1949 he emigrated to the United States, settling in Buffalo, where he taught at the local branch of the Ukrainian Music Institute. His collaboration with poet Leonid Poltava was especially productive, resulting in song cycles and a children’s operetta. In all, Bezkorowajnyj composed some 350 pieces, primarily art songs, choral works and incidental music, much of which was intended for amateur performers.

Composer and musicologist Ihor Sonevytsky (b. 1926, Halynkivtsi, Ukraine, d. 2006, Lexington, USA) was born into the family of a philologist, writer and teacher, and a journalist, art gallery manager and amateur singer. He studied at the Lysenko Music Institute and the First Ukrainian High School in Lviv. Later he studied at the Vienna Music Academy and graduated from the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Munich with a degree in composition and conducting. Following his arrival in New York, he was among the founders of the Ukrainian Music Institute of America in 1952, and following the death of Roman Sawycky in 1960, Sonevytsky became its director. He completed a doctorate from the Ukrainian Free University in Munich in 1961 and was a visiting lecturer of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Rome. Sonevytsky’s extensive experience conducting Ukrainian-American choirs resulted in him composing many sacred and secular choral works, and owing to his work with the Ukrainian Stage Ensemble in New York, incidental music became the dominant genre in his output. He also composed an opera, a ballet version of Cinderella, chamber works for winds, solo piano compositions and many art songs. Sonevytsky wrote a monograph about composer Artem Vedel.

Author of the “Composers of the Ukrainian Diaspora” articles, Taras Filenko has degrees in ethnomusicology from the University of Pittsburgh (PhD, 1998) and Historical Musicology from the Ukrainian National Academy of Music (Kand. Nayk, 1989). From 1998 to the present, he has been on the faculty of the Duquesne University, City Music Center, Studio Piano, Core Musicianship. His publications include Світ Миколи Лисенка, UVAN, NY, 2009 (409 pp.), The World of Mykola Lysenko, Ukraine Millennium Foundation, Edmonton, 2001 (540 pp.), Yakiv Yatsenevych and His Time, in progress, UVAN, NY, (110pp.).

Composer George Fiala (b. 1922, Kyiv, Ukraine, d. 2017, Montreal, Canada) was born into a family of amateur musicians, and he enrolled in a preparatory school for the Kyiv Conservatory in 1934. He subsequently studied at the Kyiv Conservatory with Borys Liatoshynsky and Lev Revutsky, received his doctorate from the Akademische Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, where he studied with Wilhelm Furtwängler, and completed post-doctoral studies at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Brussels. In 1949 he settled in Montreal.

As a composer, Fiala combined the traditions of Ukrainian music, German Neo-Romanticism and the twelve-tone techniques of the New French School. He produced more than 150 works, including symphonies, concertos for piano, violin and flute, quintets, quartets, trios and sonatas for strings and winds, solo piano works, choral pieces, art songs, an operetta, a ballet and a liturgy. His works have been performed by virtually every orchestra in Canada, and commissions on Ukrainian subjects constitute an important part of his output.

Composer Marian Kouzan (b. 1925, Isai, Ukraine, d. 2005, Fremont, France) moved to France at a very young age and began music lessons at the age of eight. In 1945 the entered the Paris Conservatory and graduated in 1948. He supported himself by taking various positions in the music entertainment industry and wrote music in popular music genres. Kouzan considered the 1960s to be the beginning of his composing career, which combined music for stage, and film and television soundtracks for the “show business” industry, as well as a wide variety of instrumental music for unusual combinations of instruments, with an emphasis on brass and percussion. Many of his works had Ukrainian themes, including the soundtrack to a documentary film about artist Jacques Hnizdovsky, the oratorios Neofity and Poslaniie to texts by Taras Shevchenko and the Chornobyl Requiem to a text by Vasyl Barka.

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.

Composer, arranger, conductor, ethnographer and educator Alexander Koshetz (b. 1875, Romashky, Ukraine, d. 1944, Winnipeg, Canada) was born into a priestly family and studied at the Kyiv Academy and the Lysenko Music and Drama Institute. Koshetz began conducting choirs while still a student and directed the choirs of the Lysenko Institute, Kyiv University and the Kyiv Conservatory. He also worked at Mykola Sadovky’s Ukrainian Theatre and the Kyiv Opera House. In 1919, at the directive of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, he became co-founder and chief conductor of the Ukrainian Republican Cappella, which toured Europe and the Americas with the aim of introducing the world to Ukraine. Kozhetz produced large numbers of a cappella choral arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs. He also introduced American audiences to Mykola Leontovych’s “Shchedryk.” Following the fall of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, Koshetz settled in the United States. While living in the diaspora, he composed most of his liturgical music. From 1941 to 1944 he led annual choral conducting courses in Winnipeg. He also began developing a music curriculum for the Ukrainian diaspora, writing a history of Ukrainian choral music and produced a recording project on the Ukrainian choral tradition.

Peter John Lazarowich, Ukrainian Canadian lawyer and community leader was born in a village of Bereziv, Kolomyia povit (later Pechenizynskyi povit, Germ. Bezirk Peczeniżyn, Pol. Powiat Peczeniżyński), Eastern Halychyna, Austro-Hungary, on December 28, 1900. He came to Canada with his parents, siblings and other relatives in 1903.

He was raised on a farm in the Province of Saskatchewan, fifty miles south of Prince Albert. He completed his Public School education in his own community and then proceeded to Saskatoon where he completed High School and Teachers College. He taught school for several years in various parts of Saskatchewan, and then entered the University of Saskatchewan, Faculty of Arts, and graduated with a B.A. degree in 1927. That same year he married Miss Thelma Radyk, also a school teacher, and shortly afterward they moved to Edmonton, where they resided for the rest of their lives.

In 1931, Lazarowich graduated from the University of Alberta with a degree of L.L.C. and was admitted to the Bar of Alberta on October 15th, 1932. On the same day he left for Europe to take a postgraduate course in Slavonic History and Literature at the Charles University in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He remained there throughout the winter of 1932 and spring 1933 attending both the Charles University and Free Ukrainian University located there. After completing his courses, he travelled widely in Central Europe (Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania and Germany). During this trip he visited Halychyna. Afterwards, he also took a trip to England and Scotland and while there read a paper before the Royal Institute of International Affairs on conditions in Ukraine. Upon returning to Canada in the fall of 1933, he commenced the practice of law and has been practicing law until his retirement.

He was named Queen’s Council in 1948. He was the President of the Edmonton Bar Association and member of the executive of the Edmonton Junior Chamber of Commerce. He was active in the Liberal Party for many years and was a member of the executive of the Edmonton Liberal Association in various capacities. He was one of the Liberal candidates in the City of Edmonton in two Provincial elections.

In addition to those activities, he took an active part in the community life of Edmonton. He was a Chairman of the Edmonton Public Library Board, a President of the Scona Home and School Association, and during the years 1951-1952, he was a President of the Men’s Canadian Club of Edmonton.

In his Ukrainian-Canadian community, he was an influential individual in the Ukrainian Self-Reliance League / Союз Українців Самостійників (USRL/CYC) family organization, and one of the founders of USRL/CYC in 1927. From 1936 to 1940 Peter Lazarowich was the President of USRL/CYC National Executive. In 1958-1963 he was the National President of USRA/TYC (Товариство Українців Самостійників) and SUND (Союз Українських Народних Домів). He was a President of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress - Edmonton (UCC), a member of the Order of St. Andrew and St. John’s Institute and a founding member of the Ukrainian Professional Businessmen’s Club of Edmonton.

In his church community he was a member of the Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral of St. John in Edmonton, legal representative for his cathedral and a member of the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church (UGOC) of Canada Consistory Board from 1954 to 1970, choir conductor and a cathedral delegate at all the Ordinary and Extra-Ordinary Sobors of the UGOC of Canada.

As a result of his contributions to the Ukrainian community he received the following recognitions:
• Honorary member of St. John’s Cathedral
• Shevchenko medal from UCC National
• Honorary Certificate from the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church of Canada
• Honorary Certificate from the Ukrainian Self-Reliance League of Canada
• Honorary member of the Ukrainian Professional Businessmen’s Club of Edmonton.

Peter John Lazarowich passed away in Edmonton on May 15, 1983.