Nathan Bernacki is a practitioner of Bulgarian folk music and dance from North Carolina, USA. His research interests involve epistemologies of musical time in the Balkan Peninsula, and the politics and ethics of combining ethnography and analysis.

Since adolescence he has learned, taught, and performed Balkan traditional dances in numerous North American Balkan dance groups, and has played gŭdulka (гъдулка: Bulgarian fiddle) since his early teenage years. He has studied Bulgarian traditional music with notable instrumentalists and singers such as Georgi Doytchev, Nikolai Kolev, Ivanka Paunova, Ivan and Tzvetanka Varimezovi, Angel Dobrev, Angel Todorov Dobrev, Stoimen Dobrev, and others. After spending two years in UCLA’s undergraduate ethnomusicology program, Nathan relocated to Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria for the latter half of his undergraduate education. There, he completed a B.A in Political Science and International Relations while simultaneously studying gŭdulka with the professional folklore ensemble Ansambŭl Pirin.

Nathan has recently completed a Master’s degree in Ethnomusicology at UBC with his thesis Nuancing the 2:3 Ratio: Microtiming Analyses from the Transnational Macedonian Region exploring the influence of political ideology on microtiming practices in Bulgaria and the choreographic determination of meter in the Macedonian Zurla/Tapan tradition. His current research concerns timing in Bulgarian non-metric bavni pesni (бавни песни: slow songs) through a combination of ethnographic and quantitative methodologies.