Isabel Frey is a Senior Artist at the Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology and a Yiddish singer. Her research interests include Jewish music and diaspora, ethnomusicological minority studies, music and protest, music and nationalism, folk music transmission and performance practices, gender studies, queer and postcolonial studies, voice research, and sound studies, as well as music in the context of memory politics. She completed her PhD 2024 in the interdisciplinary structured doctoral program "Music Matters" at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna with a dissertation on contemporary transmission and performance of Yiddish folk songs and the political dimensions of the Yiddish voice. Prior to that, she studied interdisciplinary social and cultural sciences at Amsterdam University College and medical anthropology and sociology at the University of Amsterdam. In 2023, she spent a semester as a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. Additionally, she co-led, alongside Benjy Fox-Rosen, the Artistic Research Pilot Project “Challenging the Theater of Memory: Yiddish Song beyond Kitsch and Stereotype” at the Music and Minorities Research Center of the mdw. She is currently the principal investigator of the FWF-funded research project „(Un)heard Neighbors: An urban ethnomusicology of proximity” (10.55776/TAI1016625, 2025–2027).

As a musician, Frey performs regularly with various ensembles both in Austria and internationally and regularly teaches Yiddish music at international festivals such as Yiddish Summer Weimar, KlezKanada and Yiddish New York. In 2020, she released her debut album “Millennial Bundist,” followed by the debut album of her vocal duo “Soveles” with Esther Wratschko in 2022, and her second solo album, „Di fliendike pave“ in 2024. In the fall of 2026, she will release a new duo album with Benjy Fox-Rosen, „Lebn mir eybik?". For 2023-2024, she was selected as one of five artists in the “World Music” category for the Austrian Foreign Ministry’s "New Austrian Sound of Music" funding program. In addition to her musical work, Frey is also active as a curator and organizer. She co-organizes the Friling Festival for Yiddish Music and, since 2024, has served as a co-curator of the KlezMORE Festival Vienna. She is also the founder of the Jewish-Arab peace initiative Standing Together Vienna and the art collective One State Embassy, where she is active both musically and as an activist for a just peace in the Middle East.