Workshop's Teachers
The teachers that are currently participating in the Workshop's activities

Natalia Kotsani is engaged in research on the analysis of vocal techniques, improvisation, and traditional vocal idioms of the Mediterranean. Her work focuses on combining empirical vocal practices with modern interdisciplinary approaches to enhance the voice.

As the lead performer of the group “Encardia” since 2012, with whom she has frequently traveled to Southern Italy, she has become closely associated with world music, particularly the musical traditions of Southern Italy.
She holds a Master of Arts degree in "Interpretation/Performance of Instrumental and Vocal Music" with a specialization in "Jazz Singing" (2019) from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
She also studied singing with professors E. Kylpasis (National Conservatory), M. Symeonidou (National Conservatory), E. Paspala (interpretation), jazz improvisation with S. Papalambrou (Department of Music Studies, National & Kapodistrian University of Athens), and Irish-Swedish-Norwegian singing and the "Kulning" technique with ethnomusicologist L. Gioti. She studied classical piano with professors D. Mallouchos (Athens Conservatory) and E. Kylpasis (National Conservatory), jazz piano and improvisation with S. Lancias, and theory with Charalambos Kanas (Athens Conservatory). She studied Italian traditional singing with performers V. Magnolo and A. C. Villani, while tamburello with percussionists G. Narracci and F. De Donatis in Lecce, Italy.
From 2008 to the present, she has performed numerous concerts in Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Cyprus, appearing at some of the largest festivals and concert venues in Greece. She composed music for the short documentary Shadow Fighting (2021), which was selected as an official entry for the Thessaloniki Film Festival 2022, and for the theatrical performance Ioanna of the Metro (2022), directed by K. Arzoglou. She has recorded two solo albums and three albums with the band Encardia, along with numerous contributions to other record labels. In 2023, she set to music and performed, together with Tasos Kofodimos, the Cretan Renaissance poem Apokopos by Bergadis, in a performance selected by the Ministry of Culture as part of the program "All of Greece, One Culture 2023."
She holds a diploma from the School of Applied Mathematics and Physical Sciences and is a PhD candidate at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens. She has published her research papers in numerous international conferences and journals and has served as a member of conference organizing committees. In 2021, she created “Polyfōnía,” a prototype system that generates polyphonies by recognizing the singer's hand movements through a sensor with cameras. The system was presented at the NIME conference in Shanghai (2021) and at the “Sound and Music Computing” (SMC) conference in France (2022). She is a scientific associate at the “Laboratory of Music Acoustics and Technology” (LabMat) of the Department of Music Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and a researcher at the “Laboratory of Logic and Computational Science” (CoReLab) and the “Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Learning” (AILS) at the National Technical University of Athens. In 2022, she was selected as a Mentor at one of the world's largest music conferences, New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) in New Zealand, and in 2024, as a Mentor at the NASA International Space Apps Hackathon.