The soprano Besa Llugiqi was born in Priština, Kosovo, in 1986. A winner of the 2013 Grand Prix Award at the International Competition “Elena Nikolai” in Bulgaria, she commands an impressively cultivated voice as well as an innate sense of musical line and natural legato, her operatic debut at Tirana State Opera House as Liù in “Turandot” in 2011 led to engagements at numerous opera houses and international festivals. She has since collaborated with musicians including Giuseppe Gipali, Henk Smit, Rafet Rudi, Claudio Buchler, Marilyn Schmiege, Vittorio Parisi, Ekhart Wycik, Ricardo Rodriguez Moreso, Claudio Donadio, Nayden Todorov, Sebastiano Rolli, Noorman Widjaja, Ognian Draganoff, José Maria Florêncio, Chris McCracken, Maria de Rose, Jennifer Larmore, Bruna Baglioni, and Vera Nemirova.

On stage, Besa has performed the roles of Donna Elvira in “Don Giovanni”, Lauretta in “Gianni Schicchi”, Mimi in “La Boheme”, Lucia in “Lucia di Lammermoor”, Violetta in “La Traviata”, and Liù in “Turandot”, among others. She has also been invited to sing “Messe in A” from Cesar Franck in Austria and Italy, and as a soloist in Gabriel Faure’s “Requiem” in Albania, as well as Mozart’s “Requiem” in Bulgaria. In 2018 she made her debut with the Baltic Opera in Gdansk as Thaïs. In 2019 she debuted the role of Ines in Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine, working on her role with stage director Vera Nemirova.