Fall Arts Preview 2026: Music isn’t the one focus for singer and photographer Anastasya Korol – San Diego Union-Tribune

But for the previous 13 years, this San Diego State University graduate has additionally headed Anastasya Photography, a one-woman operation that focuses on particular person and household portraits, weddings and boudoir shoots.

“I think music and photography are parts of the same thing,” mentioned Korol, who was born in Omsk, Russia, and was solely 4 years previous when her household moved to Maryland.

“If you are looking at a prism, or a pyramid shape, everything gives a different perspective,” Korol mentioned. “Music provides us a variety for perceiving the human expertise. So does images. I view each as trying on the identical precise factor from totally different angles.

“My ideal photo clients want a visual representation of their truest and deepest self — ‘This is who I am and I want (this image) to remember that.’ I feel the same way when I’m singing and when I’m teaching my students to get to the seed of their arts and their essence, through the sound of their voices. It’s all about: ‘How do I create this authentic thing?’ Because we are all creators.”

A classically skilled pianist and singer who strongly gravitated to jazz whereas attending Saddleback College in Orange County, Korol grew up in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., together with her music-loving dad and mom and brother. It was there she turned concerned with images, first as a teenage mannequin after which as an assistant to a veteran photographer who mentored her.

“He loaned me lenses and cameras, and taught me how to edit and use Photoshop,” Korol recalled. “Then, he had me start coming to photo sessions with him and that’s when I began helping pose and direct people. I’d also change the lighting and the props.”

Korol moved to coastal Orange County in 2010 when she was 20. After enrolling at Saddleback, she started learning jazz and opera with equal dedication. She additionally studied music idea, concord, composition and recording expertise, in addition to studying darkish room abilities for her images.

Upon discovering Saddleback’s scholar large band had no vocalist, she lobbied the varsity’s jazz teacher, Joey Sellers, who was reluctant so as to add a singer. But after listening to her sing, he was sufficiently impressed to make Korol a featured member of the ensemble. She received a songwriting competitors quickly thereafter and used her $1,000 prize cash to purchase an electrical keyboard.

Alas, becoming a member of the massive band was not bump-free for Korol, as she now remembers with some bemusement.

“My classical voice instructor kicked me out of the program,” she mentioned. “He told me that if I did jazz, it would ‘ruin my voice’ and my technique. But I really, really wanted to sing in the big band and take jazz classes. I was in the jazz program for a year-and-a-half, and it was awesome. I was the featured singer in all the big band concerts and Joey gave me a part-time job as his music librarian.”

Armed together with her affiliate diploma in music, Korol enrolled at SDSU in 2014. While the varsity had a long-established jazz program that has expanded exponentially lately, no jazz vocal program existed on the time.

Bill Yeager, then the top of the jazz research program, introduced in high San Diego singer Leonard Patton — who this yr toured the world as a member of the Pat Metheny Group — to work with Korol. It was whereas she was at SDSU that her images abilities got here again into play.

Just as she had at Saddleback, Korol started taking footage of her fellow music college students to make use of on flyers selling their recitals. The professor who ran the music enterprise research division employed her to take head pictures of all the scholars in this system.

Korol additionally took images of a efficiency by Fistfights With Wolves, a band that she subsequently joined and whose keyboardist and guitarist, Matthew Rakers, is now her husband. They dwell in Ramona with their two cats, Marcus Aurelias and Pi Pi (which is Russian slang for “squeak squeak”).

Korol graduated from SDSU in 2016 with an interdisciplinary diploma in music and images. The two proceed to be intertwined for her.

“Toward my end of college, I was making half my income from photography,” she mentioned. “Then I started teaching voice lessons at the San Diego Music & Art Company, which my husband cofounded. Some of the SDSU music students I took head shots of 10 years ago are now getting married and I’m taking their wedding photos.”

Korol’s images enterprise tends to extend in spring and summer time due to a surge in weddings throughout these seasons. Her music gigs normally have an uptick within the fall and winter.

Fistfights With Wolves, the edgy math- and prog-rock group Korol sings in, launched its new album — “Sea Shanties for Future Sailors” — in May. Her different band, Phantom Twins, is finishing a brand new album, “There’s Only Justice in Art,” due out in November.

She additionally has two concert events arising. On Oct. 2, she is going to carry out with Phantom Twins on the Escondido Music & Art Company, and on Oct. 2, she’ll carry out in a jazz duo at The Barn in Ramona.

“I want my photography clients and the people who hear me sing to feel seen, moved and accepted,” Korol mentioned.

“When I am singing, I have a visual in my head and I’m singing the sound of the visual, which has colors and textures. With my students, I use visual cues or symbols to explain how the voice and sound work, because music has an arc and is never in a straight line. With photography, I do implied movement where something looks like it just happened or is about to. And that relates to music, too, because music is experienced through time.”