Žana Lekić

Flautist Žana Lekić is a professor at the Music Academy in Cetinje in Montenegro. She was born in the city of Kraljevo in Serbia, where she finished elementary and secondary music studies in the class of the prominent pedagogue Karolj Maročik at the Stevan Mokranjac Music School. In 1997 she enrolled in the Music Academy in Cetinje in the class of the eminent flautist Ljubiša Jovanović, graduating in 2000 and subsequently earning a master’s degree with highest honors in 2003. Throughout her schooling she won numerous awards in local, national and international competitions as both a soloist and chamber musician.

She has attended seminars with the world’s leading flutists, including János Bálint (Hungary), Michael Debost and Kathleen Chastain (USA), Aurèle Nicolet ( Switzerland), Jiří Válek (Czech Republic), Eje Kaufeldt and Gunilla von Bahr (Sweden), and Dejan Gavrić and Peter Lukas Graf (Germany).

In 2000 she began teaching at the Music Academy in Cetinje. In 2009 she was named assistant professor of chamber music at the Academy, and from 2019. was promoted to tenured professor.

She has been actively engaged in musical pedagogy throughout Montenegro, including the Montenegro Summer Camp for Chamber Music. Beginning in 2003, she served for three years as a professor of flute in the music school in the city of Bijelo Polje. From 2004 to 2010, she was a professor of flute at the Vida Matjan music school in Kotor. In 2007 she founded the flute class of the Savo Popović Music School in Cetinje. She is regularly engaged by musical competition juries. Her students have won more than seventy national and international awards. As an organizer and promoter of cultural activity, she served on the Council for the Arts at the University of Montenegro for two terms between 2012–2016 and as the Acting Secretary for Culture and Media for the Municipality of Cetinje for 2014-2015.

She became an inaugural member of the Montenegro Symphony Orchestra in 2007 and played with it for eight years. She has given solo recitals at concert halls thoughout Montenegro, including all its major festivals, such as Montenegro-DEUS, Podgorica Cultural Summer, Grad Teatar Budva, Barski Ljetopis and the Montenegro Music Festival.

Abroad she has performed in Germany in 2000 as soloist with the Göttingen City Chamber Orchestra and in 2010 in Italy at the Nei Suoni dei Luoghi festival, where she premiered the work of composer and professor Ante Grgin. In 2012, she and pianist Oleksej Molchanov premiered Grgin’s Sonata for Flute and Piano. In 2013 she gave a recital at the Hall of Ministry of Culture in Cetinje, playing piccolo as well. In 2014 she performed in Croatia at the Mimara Museum in Zagreb and also in China, as an official representative of Montenegro, at the Beijing Flute Festival and at the Qingtao Opera House. The following year her performances included Dubrovnik and Rijeka in Croatia, as well as Paris. She has appeared in the Sarajevo Winter Festival, where she gave the premiere in Bosnia-Herzegovina of a composition by the Montenegrin composer Dejan Krdžić as well as in the Montenegro premiere of Nicole Chamberlain’s work Orion’s Belt, performed as part of the Budo Tomović Cultural-Information Center’s project entitled Composers from the Shadows, II. Yet another premiere in which she has appeared was Olivier Penard’s composition on a text by Alphonse Daudet, La chèvre de Monsieur Seguin, as part of a collaboration between the Budo Tomović Cultural-Information Center and the Institut Français in Podgorica.

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary celebration of the independence of Montenegro, held under the auspices of the Embassy of Montenegro in May 2016, she performed in the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow, where she again premiered work by the Montenegrin composer Dejan Krdžić.