“Music is a powerful force meant for everyone — and its presence in community life is needed now more than ever.”

That belief has guided Gergana Velinova (Gair-GAH-nah) accross continents, languages, and stages throughout her life — shaping not only her music, but the communities she has built around it. 

“The honey-voiced vocalist,” as the Toronto Sun describes her, Gergana is a Bulgarian–Canadian jazz vocalist, poet, and songwriter, and in her world, those three things exist as one. She has been writing poems since the age of seven.

 For Gergana, songwriting begins where poetry and lived experience meet. Her songs grow from that same interior place: a personal truth that finds its melody and unfolds, note by note and word by word, from the intimate toward the universal. 

Her roots are not simply where she comes from. They are audible in what she creates. Born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, into a family where artistry was woven into daily life; her mother a concert pianist, her grandfather a composer and conductor, she grew up understanding music as a living language with its own memory and mystery. That heritage surfaces in her compositions: in the intricate rhythmic turns, the haunting melodic colors, the subtle echo of Bulgarian Women’s Choir sound that threads through her contemporary jazz language. It is a sonic world that belongs entirely to her.

A First Prize winner of the International Chamber Music Competition “Music and Earth,” Gergana trained at the National Music School in Bulgaria before moving to Los Angeles to study Jazz Voice Performance at the Musicians Institute in Hollywood. She later earned a Master of Arts in Voice Performance from the Longy School of Music in Boston , developing a rare fluency across jazz, musical theatre, and classical art song that continues to influence the emotional range of everything she writes.

During her years in New York City, she formed the eclectic Ensemble Gergana and produced her own concert series in Soho, cultivating an artistic voice that moved freely between jazz, art song, and original composition. While in NYC she pursued advanced vocal studies with Metropolitan Opera soprano Stefka Evstatieva and with internationally acclaimed soprano Lucy Shelton, whose lifelong devotion to contemporary classical music remains a lasting influence. 

Gergana’s performances have taken her to renowned venues including Merkin Concert Hall in New York, Pickman Hall in Boston, Earshot Live Jazz at SOM in Seattle, the Chan Centre in Vancouver, and jazz clubs such as Cornelia Street Café, Frankie’s, and Tula’s, as well as stages including the Victoria, Bansko and Vancouver International Jazz Festivals. She has recorded and performed Juno - and Grammy nominees including Don Thompson, Neil Swainson, Keith Ganz, Phil Dwyer to name a few.

Alongside her work as a performer and composer, Gergana has spent years placing music in the lives of those who might never have found it otherwise. As an Ambassador Artist for New York City’s Save the Music Initiative in the years leading up to September 11, 2001, she brought music programs into public schools across the Bronx and Harlem. In the wake of that tragedy, she founded the Holy Cross Children’s Choir, whose performances honouring community members lost that day were featured in NYC local news. She went on to found the New York Bulgarian Children’s Choir and School now named “Gergana” after her. The choir has been recognized with one of the highest cultural distinctions awarded by the President of Bulgaria, and later served for seven years as Head Vocal Jazz Instructor at the Victoria Conservatory of Music. 

Gergana’s poetry remains at the heart of her creative life. Her two published books of poetry are not separate from her music — they are the same voice, finding different forms. 

During the pandemic, Gergana longed to be of help to others. In music she found a way to do just that — becoming, in her own words, a kind of “nurse of hearts.” She helped revive a music program at West Vancouver Community Services, strengthening the West Vancouver Heritage Choir at a time when it faced closure and rebuilding children’s music programs after months of silence. She also founded the Lions Den House Concerts series, presenting Juno- and Grammy-nominated artists in intimate settings that reconnect audiences with the quiet power of live music. From classrooms and choirs to concert halls, she has spent her career guided by a belief she holds deeply: that music must be nurtured, cultivated, and shared with everyone.

Free, her seventh album, released June 12, 2026 on Cellar Music Group, is where many strands of her artistic journey gather into one. Written over five transformative years — through motherhood, a child’s illness, a global pandemic, and the quiet arrival of Canadian citizenship — it carries the intimacy of music written not for a stage, but for one small listener asleep in her arms. Produced in reunion with platinum-certified producer and fellow Sofia Music School alumnus Kristian Alexandrov, Free moves across ECM-inspired contemporary jazz, jazz-pop, bossa nova, blues reflections, and lyrical ballads — every melody shaped to be sung, remembered, and lived with. You come to Free thinking you are listening to her story. Somewhere along the way, you realize you are listening to your own.

Today, whether performing, recording, or teaching at the Vancouver Symphony School of Music, Gergana remains guided by the same belief that has shaped every decision of her artistic life: that music is a powerful force meant for everyone — and that its presence in community life is needed now more than ever.