Conference Programme

Jacob develops programmes, partnerships and public conversations that bring people together around society's most pressing questions. As Head of the Centre for Sustainability in Culture at Kulturens Analyseinstitut, Jacob leads national initiatives at the intersection of culture, research, policy and civil society. His work focuses on translating complex societal challenges into programmes, partnerships and public engagement that create lasting impact. Previously, Jacob co-founded and led Bæredygtigt Kulturliv NU, Denmark's first organisation dedicated to accelerating the sustainable transition of the cultural sector. He also served as programme lead for the Nordic Green Accelerator programme. Working with leading symphony orchestras from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland, he helped design and facilitate a year-long process translating the Nordic Green Orchestra Guide into organisational strategies and concrete action. 

Alongside programme development and strategic leadership, Jacob regularly moderates debates, facilitates workshops and designs conferences and public conversations that connect artists, researchers, policymakers and audiences. Before moving into cultural strategy, Jacob worked as a professional actor for more than 10 years. He holds a MiniMBA in Sustainable Management and is a certified Creative Climate Leader (Julie's Bicycle & Lund University).

Athina Kontou is a German-Greek double bassist whose work explores the intersections of contemporary jazz, traditional music and free improvisation. She grew up between Frankfurt am Main and Athens and has been based in Cologne since 2021. The debut album Tzivaeri by her band Mother was nominated for the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik and the German Jazz Award. In 2024, Athina Kontou was nominated for the German Jazz Award in the “String Instruments” category. She studied jazz double bass in Weimar and Leipzig and musicology in Mainz.

She is actively involved on a voluntary basis with organisations representing jazz musicians in Germany, advocating for greater sustainability. She is a member of the Sustainability Working Group of the German Jazz Union and served from 2022 to 2025 on the Sustainability Committee of the German Cultural Council as a representative of the German Music Council. In 2024, she and her band Mother took part in the Green Pilot Tour, funded by the European Jazz Network and Initiative Musik and organised through a collaboration between Jazzahead and the Swedish organisation Knutpunkt. She is also a board member of the Kölner Jazzkonferenz, the organisation representing jazz musicians in Cologne.

Lena Krause is the executive director of FREO – Freie Ensembles und Orchester in Deutschland e.V., an advocacy organization. Her work focuses on the funding, organizational, and legal frameworks within which independent ensembles and self-employed musicians operate. She advocates for improving the social and financial circumstances of self-employed musicians, as well as for ensuring a legally secure framework for self-employment. She has been a member of the Executive Board of the German Music Council since 2021. She is a full member of the advisory board of the Green Culture Contact Point and of the advisory board of the KSK (Insured Music). From 2017 to 2023, she served as spokesperson for the Alliance of the Independent Arts, a cross-disciplinary coalition of 20 national associations. She studied music theater studies and theater and orchestra management. She aims to give political weight to the concerns of the cultural sector at the federal level and to bring them resolutely to the Bundestag.

Louis Presset has been Executive Director of FEVIS – the French Federation of Specialized Vocal and Instrumental Ensembles – since 2018. Before joining FEVIS, he worked at the Institut français, where he was responsible for coordinating distribution strategy and digital platforms within the Cinema Department. Prior to this, he spent two years working on “France, Guest of Honour at the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair” as Deputy Commissioner General, following three years as Director of the Institut français in Bandung, Indonesia, from 2012 to 2015.

Earlier in his career, he held several positions at the Institut français in Paris, first as Advisor for Classical, Contemporary and Early Music, and later as Performing Arts and Music Coordinator within the Cultural Seasons Department.

Renata is a flutist trained in classical and contemporary music at conservatories in Brussels, Tilburg, and Liège. Her work is closely connected to questions of sustainability and well-being in performance. In her master’s thesis, she explored sustainable performance practices in contemporary repetitive solo flute music, drawing on her own experience with the Alexander technique. She performs regularly with a wide range of classical and contemporary ensembles and is also involved in projects that combine improvisation, electronics, and visual elements. Previously artistic director of Collectif Dódeka, she has develop multi-disciplinary contemporary music projects such as Beyond Borders, supported by the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles. She performs internationally at festivals and concert venues around Europe and Asia. As a member of the Fractales ensemble, she works closely with both emerging and established composers and has taken part in more than a hundred world premieres. Since 2016, she has released six studio albums spanning classical, contemporary, and experimental electronic music. She has worked in a pre-doctoral position in an artistic research team in the project « Embodying Expression, Gender, Charisma in Classical Music » and is still pursuing her PhD at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Linz, Austria.

Antònia Folguera curates festivals, conferences and podcast/radio projects that connect the dots (and people) between digital culture, music, arts, science and technology. She is curator at Sónar+D, and part of the curatorial teams at Eufònic and STRP festivals. She is part of the XRCB (Barcelona Community Radio Network) a platform and research project for community, ethical and techno political podcasting. She is co-presenter of the cultural magazine of Ràdio Rambles, a radio station located in an old flower booth at the Barcelona Rambles. From 2019 and until 2021 she is jury member and tutor at the arts grants Barcelona Producció. She moderates and presents countless cultural events, big and small, with a focus in arts, technology and culture, but also community projects with an activist angle.

Bernhard Günther has been Artistic Director of the festival Wien Modern since 2016. From 2012 to 2022 he directed the festival ZeitRäume Basel – Biennial for New Music and Architecture, which first took place in 2015. From 2004 to 2016, as Chief Dramaturg of the Philharmonie Luxembourg, he was responsible for the rainy days festival. With unfinished studies at the Musikhochschule Lübeck (Violoncello) and the University of Vienna (Musicology, Theatre Studies, Linguistics, etc.), he came to mica – music information center austria as Editor of the Lexicon of Contemporary Music from Austria and continued his work there until 2004 as curator and deputy director.

As a passionate visitor to and organiser of concerts of various genres and formats, he has been intensely involved in new music and its surroundings for over 25 years. He is a cultural manager, curator, author, dramaturge, musicologist, jury member, graphic designer, occasional cellist, and part-time biodynamic winegrower, is married, has one daughter, and lives in Vienna.

Tze Yeung Ho is a Norwegian-Finnish composer and the current artistic director of Borealis - a festival for experimental music. Tze Yeung holds a doctoral degree (PhD) from the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre and a master's degree from the Norwegian Academy of Music. He was also a visiting student in the phonetics department at the University of Helsinki. His work as artistic director of Borealis engages experimental music through his own artistic practice and experience in connecting various parts of society with artistic approaches to music, sound and art.

Kim Ngoc is a Hanoi based mixed-media composer, improvisational sound artist/performer, and curator who studied music in Hanoi and Germany. Having started as a composer, she went on to focus on the development of a trans-disciplinary artistic language. Her current work focuses on developing an indigenous ‘grammar’ with which to engage with wider global contemporary praxis, creating distinctly Vietnamese works which have nevertheless found recognition in the international arena. 

Kim Ngoc is a major presence within the Vietnamese contemporary music scene and was named by Forbes as one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Vietnam 2019. She is the founder of DomDom, the first and only independent center devoted to the development of contemporary experimental music and arts in Vietnam, thereby helping to foster a new generation of young artists. Organising the Hanoi New Music Festival in 2009, 2013, 2018, was one of Kim Ngoc’s major contributions towards putting contemporary experimental music of Vietnam and Southeast Asian on the map. 

Kamila Metwaly is a music journalist, electronic musician and curator based between Berlin and Cairo. From 2004 to 2009, Metwaly founded an independent arts and culture publication in Egypt and worked in radio and the independent film scene, maintaining a solid presence in Cairo’s cultural and activist scenes for many years. In 2017, Metwaly relocated to Berlin and joined SAVVY Contemporary, where she launched a long term curatorial project titled “Untraining the Ear Listening Sessions”, focusing on listening practices that challenge the epistemology of Western Euro-American music canon. Her practice engages with various formats weaving performative and installative tools to expand and re-engage with non-dominant and non-normative music and sound histories and cultures.

As a curator and music researcher, Metwaly has been working on various exhibition and performances projects, including: “What Has All This Got To Do With Coconuts And Rice: A Listening Exhibition on José Maceda” (SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2017), “We Have Delivered Ourselves from the Tonal: Of, with, towards, on Julius Eastman” (SAVVY Contemporary/MaerzMusik – Festival for Time Issues, Berlin, 2018), “The Dog Done Gone Deaf: Exploring the Sonic Cosmologies of Halim El-Dabh” with Bonaventure Ndikung (Dak’Art Biennale, Senegal, 2018), and “Here History Began: Tracing the Re/Verberations of Halim El-Dabh” (SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2020–2021). In 2021, she has been appointed as a guest research curator for Donaueschingen Global, a project of the Donaueschinger Musiktage to celebrate its 100th anniversary. Metwaly served as leading curator of MaerzMusik, programming its 2022 edition together with the artistic director Berno Odo Polzer. Following his departure, she took over as artistic director of the festival on 1 September. She will be in charge of the festival MaerzMusik in the years to come.

Krzysztof Pietraszewski is a curator, cultural manager, music journalist, and law graduate from Jagiellonian University. Since 2016 he is the artistic director of the Sacrum Profanum Contemporary Music Festival. From 2009 he has been run the radio program Muzykoteka, which previously aired on Radiofonia and Jazzkultura and now airs on Radio Kraków Kultura. In 2019 received the Creative Scholarship of the City of Krakow.