Lidia Valenta

Early life

Born in Brest, Belarus, she grew up in Czechoslovakia and Russia. Since 1998 she has lived in Germany, and now calls Dresden her home.

At the age of six she began to study piano, vocal, and musical theory, and soon after she won the Young Composers Competition in Prague. At the age of eight, she began to sing in various choirs in Prague, and later in Kalningrad to where she moved in 1986. She formally studied at Kaliningrad State University (now called Baltic Federal University), graduating in 1999; and also studied vocals at the Lidia Nebaba Theater of Romance Music in Moscow.

Professional singing career

Lidia Valenta has performed in major music venues in Russia and Europe, including Buryat State Opera and Ballet Theater in Ulan Ude; Central House of Art Professionals in Moscow; Jupiter Concert Hall in Nizhny Novgorod; the Tonne Jazz Club in Dresden; and the Russian House of Culture and Science in Rome.

The Sachsische Zeitung, the leading newspaper for Dresden and the entire Free State of Saxony, said that Lidia Valenta's style of singing is ``enchanting and fairy-tale like.

She writes most of her own songs, but she also draws inspiration from Russian, British, and American poetry, including by authors such as Vladimir Isaichev, Anna Akhmatova, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti. Some of her top songs include, ``Nochnoi poezd (2010); ``Follow me (2011); ``Not enough (2013); ``Flawless (2013); ``Love (2015); and ``I can't resist (2015).

In September 2012, she was a member of an expedition that flew across Lake Baikal in a hot air balloon in order to draw attention to environmental issues related to preserving Baikal's unique eco-system.

Professional art and design career

In 2014, Lidia Valenta began her work as a visual artist and designer, working primarily with porcelain. She collaborates with Dresdner Porzellan, one of Germany’s oldest porcelain factories, and with Holger John, a well-known German artist, at whose Dresden art gallery Ms Valenta has exhibited. The porcelain pieces are handmade and hand-painted.

Valenta said that her porcelain ``evokes the classical porcelain form, while injecting a refreshing modernist sensibility. A critic for Sachsische Zeitung in Saxony, Germany said that Ms Valenta's collection ``is a wild ride between the classical and the contemporary.