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Maya Petrovna (aka Maja Petrovna Hilčišin) is operatic crossover alto, film composer, multi-instrumentalist, and hybrid performance–costume artist. Inspired by expressionism, her immersive solo show moves thru vividly surreal visual worlds, live score to visceral surges of humanity’s alchemy, led by Maya, who composes the music, designs costumes and visual world, embodying each character.
Maya is Sarajevo-born Australian citizen who grew up in the ex Yugoslavia, surrounded by majestic mountains alongside brutalist architecture that follows you through the country like Mona Lisa from Alcatraz. She taught herself guitar and music reading while living in the underground shelters of Sarajevo city during the 1992-1996 siege, exploring first dissonances on fishing line strings. After the war, Maya studied classical guitar and operatic singing at the Sarajevo Music High School, Mladen Pozaić.
Following her graduation, Maya left Bosnia in 1999. Over the past two decades, she has shaped her sound from singing in post-punk bands in Barcelona to working in the performance art and film industry in London, Australia, Italy, and Asia.
FILM MUSIC
In 2007, Maya was accepted into the Master’s in Film Composition program at Sydney’s AFTRS, based on her portfolio and without a university degree. Since graduating, she wrote music for 21 films and award-winning shorts screened at global festivals.
Maya composed music for 10 Set to Screen Apple series on film Australia by an acclaimed film director, Baz Luhrmann, a world campaign for Tourism Australia- Asia (Revolver Film and Bazmarq), and a Vogue spot featuring Annie Leibovitz. She provided vocals and orchestral scores recorded with a chamber orchestra at the Trackdown Scoring Stage. Maya's credits include composing music for a live string orchestra performance for the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards (Sydney), a score for Suzie Lovitt's film about young Jude Law's son directed by Ben Charles Edwards and produced by Sadie Frost, and music for 13 BTS Start your Impossible series for the 2020 Paralympics, Toyota (Asia Pacific). Click for full film credits here.
Maya's compositional style merges classical and experimental forms, spanning orchestral, electronic music, authentic textural drones, songwriting, and her vocal practice across operatic, contemporary, and Slavic white voice techniques. From minimalism to large-scale sonic architecture, her music appears in film, theatre, and concert stages, defined by visceral visual charge.
After Baz Luhrmann’s film Australia premiered, Maya moved her base to London in 2009.
PERFORMANCE ART
During a 10-year UK residency, Maya developed her live show into immersive cross-form experience, emerging as a costume designer and video artist. She blends her music with symbolic scenography anchored in themes of synchronised dissonances in nature and society. Some of her scenographic visions were shaped in communion with filmmakers and artists across Europe and Australia.
For her solo show, Futura Monomania, Maya composed a score blending orchestral arrangements, contemporary opera, and electronic music, alongside designing six sculptural costumes that portrayed beings adrift in fragmented identities within a futuristic utopia. In her solo show, Love Songs from the Violent Paradise, Maya wrote contemporary operatic songs and designed seven costumes, portraying imaginative worlds of a child healing from war trauma. Maya’s work includes solo show The Womb of Universe and The Boob Monster at the Sydney Opera House for sold-out Club Kooky and the official opening of 2019 Sydney VIVID. Maya’s operatic act, Moth, directed by Bryn Harris Wathen, was a closing number during several residencies at the renowned London Box Soho. She wrote the music and designed the hand-laced creature.
Maya’s solo shows have toured Europe, including Rome and Sarajevo International Film Festivals, London Fashion Week, Berlin's Exist All Women Art Show, headlining Croatia’s Seven Days of Creation, Porec Art Festival, Prague SWAN, and at Venice Associazione Awai.
Maya aspires to own a couple of black sheep as pets one day.
Thank you for visiting, and have a wonderful day.