Asia (pronounced "ah-sha") Mieleszko's career refuses easy categorization. It's taken her from researching Ukrainian folk traditions to covering infrastructure policy, from performing on the world's biggest stages to documenting underground music scenes. The through line: She's a storyteller, endlessly curious about how people and places come to be what they are.
As a Staff Writer for Strong Towns, Asia brings together curiosity, analytical rigor, and deep empathy to examine the forces shaping our built environment. In Stacked Against Us, she podcast she produced from scratch, she guides listeners through the labyrinth of housing, finance, and local governance, revealing both the systems stacked against communities and the openings for meaningful action.
Off the clock, Asia is a singer, conductor, protector of the (very) old, and pioneer of the daringly new. Recent performance highlights include premiering Hannah Barnes’ The Garden at The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology, joining the Cortona Sessions for New Music as a 2024 vocal fellow, workshopping “Across Tongues,” an audio-visual interrogation of third culture as a 2023/24 New Jersey Folk Festival Artist-in-Residence which had its second performance at O+ Festival in Kingston, NY, presenting a lecture recital at SHE: Festival of Women in Music, and performing programs of Ukrainian village polyphony at the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
With musical roots in both Eastern European folk music and the classical tradition, Asia’s noise-making oscillates between these musical conventions and, on occasion, bridges them. She’s looking forward to bringing the next iteration of “Across Tongues” to Philadelphia, bringing her one-woman show, “Duets for Solo Performer,” to Oh My Ears Festival in Arizona, and deepening her studies of Ukrainian village music.
Along the way, she picked up photography. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Clacquers, and numerous artistic institutions. Her style is rooted in deep technical precision and playfulness, preferring to capture a sensation, not just a moment in time.
She specializes in documenting live performance, and has been invited to photograph the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival (New York City); Fire Museum Presents (Philadelphia); Cortona Session for New Music (Netherlands); Vice Versa (New York City); and a countless number of independent artists.
Outside of her many pursuits, she lives and even thrives with a rare progressive lung disease which is impossible to pronounce: Lymphangioleiomyomatosis.