Ioanida Costache
Ioanida Costache is a musician, videographer, and Roma activist that works to unravel a song-story tightly wound to Romani music. Ioanida is currently a PhD candidate in ethno/musicology at Stanford University, where her research explores issues of race and ethnicity, performance/construction of identity, cultural memory, trauma, and history, as they intersect in Romanian-Romani musico-oral traditions. From Holocaust songs to communist-era popular music, her work demonstrates that music is deeply imbricated in the project of cultural healing.
Her short documentary Light Upon (2014) paints a portrait of her violin teacher, Niculae Dumitru (Nicu Ciotoi) and touches on issues of identity, memory, and heritage through musical transmission. She is also a visiting fellow at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
@ioanidacostache