Mariana Sadovska has worked all her life in both music and theatre. She does not sing songs she learned in books. Each song is given to her by a specific person. She believes that songs are dialogues between the singer and the listener. Mariana Sadovska was born in the city of Lviv in Western Ukraine and for three years acted with the Kurbas Young Theatre in Lviv. From 1991 Mariana worked with Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices in Poland directed by Vladimierz Staniewski. The theatre's productions are the result of "expeditions" to places where traditional culture is still preserved today. Mariana traveled with Gardzienice on expeditions to Brazil, Egypt and Ireland. She appeared in that theatre's productions "The Life of Protopope Awwakum", "Carmina Burana" and "Metamorphosis or The Golden Ass", which she co-created using ancient Greek music. In 1998 she won the Best Actress Award given by the Polish Theatre Union. As the musical director of the Gardzienice Theatre, Mariana has conducted numerous workshops at colleges and universities, as well as one with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford.

Since the fall of 1999, Mariana appeared in three Yara Arts Group festivals in New York. From the fall of 2000 she was Yara's artist-in-residence and conducted special workshops on Calling Songs, Winter Songs, Spring Songs and Late Spring Songs at La MaMa Experimental Theatre, where Yara is a resident company. She first worked with Yara's Virlana Tkacz on an international project in Ukraine in 1991, titled "In the Light". In December 2000 she created the music for Yara's "Song Tree" and also appeared in this piece. She sang ancient Ukrainian songs in "Obo: Our Shamanism" Yara's co-production with Buryat artists at La MaMa in the spring of 2001. Mariana also performed at the Balkan Festival and the Balkan Cabaret in New York. For the past ten summers Mariana has traveled through the villages of Ukraine collecting folksongs and rituals. In 1993 she organized a large expedition to Ukraine with an international group of artists, musicians and researchers. In November-December 2001, Mariana helped organize the second annual Festival "Ukraine-Poland-Europe" at the Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices.

Creating her own arrangements in dialogue with ancient traditions, Mariana Sadovska approaches each piece with a fresh and uniquely personal vision. In 2001 Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times about Mariana Sadovska as follows:

Sometimes a musician has such an inborn desire to communicate that her message naturally becomes universal: it doesn’t matter whether she is singing soul or bel canto or folk. The responsibilities, protocol, and tradition of whatever style she is working in just vanish; she replaces them with pure vitality.