Katherine Emily (Katja) Rumin** (b. 2002) is a musician with many interests - performer, composer, educator, researcher…

Having studied classical viola performance, with side studies in composition and historical performance, at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (UK), Oberlin Conservatory (US), and New England Conservatory Preparatory Division (US), she now continues her studies in traditional music speciality at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre (EE).  She also has experience in free improvisation, jazz, and theatre projects.

Her projects are wide-ranging, from orchestras (including contemporary and early music), to folklore ensembles, to a solo project bringing together traditional songs with manipulated sounds and field recordings, these having taken place in spaces from back gardens to outdoor settings to spaces such as Boston Symphony Hall (US), Harpa Concert Hall (IS), and Xiaomi Arēna (LV), across North America and Europe. While in Cardiff studying at RWCMD, she was a leading member of the multigenre string quintet 3 Leaf Clover made up of RWCMD students, bringing together academic and traditional idioms and often creating arrangements for the group; she also during her studies served multiple times as principal/assistant principal violist in RWCMD and Oberlin ensembles and was frequently a member of RWCMD’s elite String Soloists group.

She recently had a new fixed-media piece premiered at the Pitt Rivers Museum (UK) as part of Cities and Memory’s A Century of Sounds project; in April 2026 piece for viola d’amore and electronics to be premiered in Tallinn as part of EMTA’s COMMUTE festival, and she also is currently creating the soundtrack for an upcoming film (Ceļā / Perfect Night) by animator Lizete Upīte. Several albums are also in the works with various projects for 2026.

She has shared the stage with and performed under the direction of many noted artists across genres —  to name a few, academic music artists Henning Kraggerud, Andrew Lawrence-King, Fenella Humphreys, and Pieter Wispelwey, improvisation specialists Maggie Nicols and Charlotte Hug, and folkmetal group Skyforger. 

Some of her mentors include Leanne Barbo, Marion Selgall, Katariin Raska, Julgī Stalte (traditional music), Dorothea Vogel, Kirsten Docter, Claudine Bigelow, and Martha Strongin-Katz (classical viola), Marcelo Politano, Jihyun Kim (composition), Lucy Robinson, Marilyn McDonald (historical performance). 

Trained classically in viola, composition, historical performance (baroque violin/viola, viola da gamba), and choral singing, in the ethnomusic world she is both a singer focused on traditional North/East European singing styles and plays modern violin as well as traditional instruments — most frequently Estonian bagpipe, small/ethnographic kokle / kannel/gusli…etc. , and tagelharpa.

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As an artist and researcher, Katja often finds herself in liminal spaces between genres, cultures, and traditions. This stems from her mixed identity as a person and artist: born and raised in northeast North America (both US and Canada) with grandparents who were all Soviet refugees from different places in North/East Europe; always feeling drawn to her own (East Slavic), neighbouring, and other musical traditions, but originally (especially not having opportunities as a young person to pursue that further) principally trained in Western academic music. Her research in an ethnomusicological sense has as yet focused on comparing different singing traditions throughout Northeast Europe.

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In her (often nonexistent) spare time, Katja is an enthusiast of words and language, nature, wild swimming, traditional/social dances of various styles, handwork, sketching, photography, and thrifting.

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**LV: Katrīna Emīlija Rumina, RU: Екатерина Рюмина (Jekaterina Rjumina). I have also used the correct romanisation as the latter as an artist name. My family’s name was anglicised when they emigrated…

View document of artistic CV here: