Olga Podgaiskaya is a Belarusian composer and organist based in Warsaw. Her catalogue spans opera, music theatre, choral and orchestral works, chamber music, film scores, and pieces for solo organ or organ with other instruments. She studied composition at the Belarusian State Academy of Music in Minsk and has developed a practice that links contemporary classical writing with performance, theatre, and moving image. Her music has appeared at Beethovenfest Bonn, the Salzburg Festival, and the Ludwigsburg Castle Festival. She is lead composer of the Five-Storey Ensemble and has also organised and directed Kinemo, a Belarusian festival devoted to contemporary music and silent film. Her opera King Stakh’s Wild Hunt, commissioned by Belarus Free Theatre and the Barbican, premiered in London in 2023.
In 2026, Podgaiskaya contributed Sounds of Silence to Official. Unofficial. Belarus., a collateral event of the 61st Venice Biennale running from 9 May to 22 November. The twenty-minute organ work moves between alarms, crescendos, and extended reverberant pauses, placing liturgical sonorities within an installation about surveillance, repression, and exile. In June 2026 she also released Organ Works, a nine-track studio album centred on the organ. The record addresses uncertainty, anxiety, enforced quiet, and the search for human connection, extending concerns shared with her Venice soundscape. Through both concert music and collaborative projects, Podgaiskaya treats silence not as an absence but as a compositional material shaped by memory, pressure, and collective experience.