Supervisor of the Kliment Kvitka Research Center for Folk Music.
Candidate of Art Criticism (thesis: “National musical culture of Meshchyora. Historical preconditions of a growing tradition and its modern exponents”, Moscow conservatory, 1986).
Member of the Russian Composers’ Union.
General Director of the Russian folklore union.
Editor-in-chief of “Musicology” magazine.

Natalia Ghilyarova was born in 1947 in Moscow.

She graduated from the Theory and Composition faculty and followed postgraduate studies at the Moscow conservatory (with A. Rudneva).

Since 1968 she worked for the Cabinet for folk music (today called the K. Kvitka Research Centre for folk music), educational and research centre, dealing with domestic folklore.

In the period of 1997-2005 she was the Dean of Musicology faculty of the Conservatory.

The basic circle of research interests of N. Ghilyarova comprises theoretical problems of modern folklore studies: interrelation of lyrics and tune in a Russian song, a phenomenon of tradition in folklore, characteristic features of Russian vocal genres, style features of Russian folk music, interethnic communication, the matters connected with the mechanism of transfer of a tradition into practice. For many years she paid much attention to work with children, seeing a revival of the best traditions of national culture through primary education as her important task.

For more than 30 years of folkloristic activity N. Ghilyarova undertook 86 folklore expeditions to Bryansk, Ryazan, Moscow, Penza, Vladimir, Lipetsk, Kaluga and Volgograd areas.

The fund of records collected by her makes more than 28.000 samples of vocal and instrumental folklore, both of Russian and of other peoples of Russia – Tatars and Mordva.

Throughout 30 years she has been supervising the Folklore Group of the Moscow conservatory – the collective which constantly appears on stages in various cities of Russia.