We’ve found three amazing musical directors to share their knowledge with Caravan.
We are currently talking to one more specialist for Turkish music who will join the team soon!
Here is the faculty for Caravan Orchestra & Choir 2026 (Full details will be published soon):
Polina Shepherd was born in a Russian Jewish family in Novosibirsk. Whilst living in Tatarstan, Central Russia in the 1980-1990s, she was one of the visible young Jewish activists during her student years, just as the Jews of Soviet Union began to turn their focus back to their roots. Helping her father to bring a Jewish community together in an industrial town Naberezhnye Chelny, recording the remaining memories of Yiddish songs from locals, performing, forming her own band, she learnt about being Jewish in Russia. At the age of 17, she joined Russia′s first professional klezmer band after Perestroika, Simcha, with whom she toured the Former Soviet Union, at the same time studying her musical heritage further.
By her early 20s she was a Yiddish choir leader, composer, bandleader, singer, an international touring musician, educator and festival organiser. Having witnessed the phoenix of Jewish culture rising from the ashes of communism and helping it is flourish and develop throughout the FSU, she is now part of the international world of Ashkenazi culture.
Now living in the UK, she continues to be an international culture makher, to open this culture and to connect it to the rest of the global village. She taught the Caravan Choir in 2021 and has been the artistic director for Caravan Orchestra & Choir since 2022.
Veronika Varga is a Budapest-based Hungarian folk singer and double bass player, primarily representing both traditional and urban music from the Balkans and the Greek Mediterranean, in Hungary and abroad, as a member of various bands and as a soloist, over the past decade.
Her artistic journey began with Hungarian folk music, but over time she found her true voice in the diverse and emotionally rich musical universe of the Balkans and the Mediterranean. For more than a decade, she has been actively creating, performing, and managing musical projects that bring these traditions to life in an authentic, contemporary and engaging way. However, throughout her artistic career, she repeatedly returns to Hungarian folk music, which originally opened the way for her toward the music of other cultures. In her band Babra, she plays tamburitza double bass while she sings traditional songs from across the Balkans, as well as from South Slavic communities that have lived in Hungary for centuries.With her BudaPesme vocal–accordion duo, she revives mainly old Macedonian and Bosnian traditional songs, as well as ex-Yugoslav coffeehouse music — all presented in an interactive way. Her quartet VreMea Válkània blends Balkan music and Greek rebetiko, featuring dual female vocals and the rich interplay of cimbalom and accordion. She recently founded her a cappella project, Lemonokipos, where she arranges nature-inspired Greek traditional songs for four female voices, with a subtle touch of Hungarian folk elements, emphasizing vocal purity and authenticity. Another of her bands, Espéria is devoted exclusively to Greek rebetiko, authentically performing songs from all periods of the genre with guitar, bouzouki, accordion and vocals.
Josh “Socalled” Dolgin is a pianist, accordionist, journalist, photographer, puppet maker, rapper, composer, magician, teacher and producer based in Montreal, Quebec. He has lectured and led master classes in music festivals around the world, from Moscow to Paris, from London to LA, and from Krakow to San Francisco, and has performed on every continent. With 8-ish solo albums (and one with Vulfpeck’s Jack Stratton and Michael Winograd as Yiddishe Pirat) and 6 produced musical comedies to his name, he has performed solo or with his band all over the world for more than 25 years. His list of collaborators knows no generational, social, cultural or religious boundaries: Chilly Gonzales, Itzhak Perlman, Lhasa de Sela, Fred Wesley, Andy Statman, Adam Cohen, Boban Markovic, the Mighty Sparrow, Roxanne Shante, Irving Fields, Killah Priest, Matisyahu, Theodore Bikel, Fanfare Ciocarlia, Enrico Macias and Derrick Carter, to name-drop a few. Dolgin was the subject of “The Socalled Movie”, a 2010 feature documentary produced by Gary Beitel and the National Film Board of Canada. Always active doing special projects, he toured Yiddish programs with Austria’s Lungau Big Band and Germany’s Kaiser Quartett, creates themesongs (the As It Happens remix, heard every night across the country on CBC), directed and released an indie erotica film and created a special program using first world war internment camp archives at the Weimar festival of Yiddish culture. Amongst other things he is currently working on the next Socalled record, a musical with New York’s Folksbiene, a collaboration with Yiddish song legend Ethel Raim and is a course lecturer in the Jewish Studies department at McGill University, teaching about the history of Eastern European Yiddish music and “living the archives”.