Andrzej Bieńkowski

Andrzej Bieńkowski (born 1946) is a painter, ethnographer and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Since 1980, during his trips to the countryside, he has accumulated an impressive private ethnographic archive containing thousands of audio and video recordings and photographs from Poland, Ukraine and Belarus.

Author of documentary films The Last Rural Musicians, Jewish Music in the Memory of Rural Musicians, Ukraine, In Search of Pagan Rituals, Musicians Gace from Radom region, and a series of short films popularising rural music (together with Monika Mencina). Author of the books The Last Rural Musicians – People, Customs, Music (Prószyński i S-ka 2001, Muzyka Odnaleziona 2012), Sold Music (Czarne, 2007), 1000 Kilometres of Music. Warsaw-Kiev (MCKiS 2009), publications in the Muzyka Odnaleziona series (Muzyka Odnaleziona publishing house, since 2007).

Winner of the Oskar Kolberg Award in 1995 and the Cyprian Kamil Norwid Award in 2008. In 2014, he received the Gloria Artis Silver Medal for his work.
Source: www.muzykaodnaleziona.pl

Since 2015, during the autumn festivals of Wszystkie Mazurki Świata (Mazurkas of the World), Andrzej Bieńkowski has been organising concerts from the Kanon Trzech (Canon of Three) series. In them, he presents outstanding figures of Polish traditional music – he reminisces and shows his own film documentation of his meetings with them. He invites young performers and continuators to participate in the concerts.