Xenia Hanusiak is an artistic director, cultural diplomat, and scholar with a lifelong dedication to the arts as an opera singer and writer embracing the many styles and traditions of the lands where she has lived, worked, and travelled. She curates performance programs, literary festivals, and ideas summits across four continents for institutions and festivals from National Sawdust, the Film Society of the Lincoln Center (New York) to the Beijing Music Festival. As a diplomat she is currently a senior policy officer, cultural affairs for the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Other senior diplomatic roles, including postings as a cultural attache for the Australian Consulate-General New York. She is currently president of the EUNIC of her local cluster and an advisor to the Fremantle Biennale. As an advocate for contemporary creativity, Xenia has commissioned and performed in over forty world and country premieres from the Aarhus Festival (Denmark) to BAM (New York). As the founding director of The Cultural Exchange, a company that creates dialogue across borders, she is the artistic director of "Songlines for a New World," a multi-disciplinary festival that promotes virtuosic women. Xenia's commentary and essays on arts, culture and society are published by the London Financial Times, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Psyche AEON, and Paris Review. Her writing for the stage includes: " A thousand doors, a thousand windows," "Un_labelled" for the Young People's Chorus of New York City, and "The Mstaken Identity." She holds a PhD in literature together with multiple degrees in music and the arts. She is a Eugene O'Neill National Critic's Institute Fellow; a Churchill Fellow; a Global Cultural Fellow, University of Edinburgh, and a visiting scholar at Columbia University (New York), Peking University and Sang Myung University (Korea). Xenia believes that soft diplomacy and cultural exchange promote not simply a greater understanding of the arts, but an important cognition of values, ways of thinking, and humanity's shared experience: leading to connections for hearts and minds.