Frey, Isabel, PhD
(Senior Artist)

Isabel Frey is a Senior Artist at the Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology and a Yiddish singer. Her research interests include Jewish music and diaspora, ethnomusicological minority studies, music and protest, music and nationalism, folk music transmission and performance practices, gender studies, queer and postcolonial studies, voice research, and sound studies, as well as music in the context of memory politics. She completed her PhD 2024 in the interdisciplinary structured doctoral program "Music Matters" at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna with a dissertation on contemporary transmission and performance of Yiddish folk songs and the political dimensions of the Yiddish voice. Prior to that, she studied interdisciplinary social and cultural sciences at Amsterdam University College and medical anthropology and sociology at the University of Amsterdam. In 2023, she spent a semester as a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. Additionally, she co-led, alongside Benjy Fox-Rosen, the Artistic Research Pilot Project “Challenging the Theater of Memory: Yiddish Song beyond Kitsch and Stereotype” at the Music and Minorities Research Center of the mdw.

As a musician, Frey performs regularly with various ensembles both in Austria and internationally. In 2020, she released her debut album “Millennial Bundist,” followed by the debut album of her vocal duo “Soveles” with Esther Wratschko in 2022. In fall 2024, her second solo album “Di Fliendike Pave” was released with the New York Yiddish music label Borsht Beat. From 2023 to 2024, she was selected as one of five artists in the “World Music” category for the Austrian Foreign Ministry’s "New Austrian Sound of Music" funding program. In addition to her musical work, Frey is also active as a curator and organizer. She co-organizes the Friling Festival for Yiddish Music and, since 2024, has served as a co-curator of the KlezMORE Festival Vienna. She is also the founder of the Jewish-Arab peace initiative Standing Together Vienna and the art collective One State Embassy, where she is active both musically and as an activist for a just peace in the Middle East.

► Publications and Lectures


Contact: +43/1/711 55 4219 | Room: AW U 0229
e-mail: frey@mdw.ac.at