She graduated from the Faculty of History, Theory, and Composition and from postgraduate school at the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music (class of Professor Marina A. Engovatova).
In 2000 she defended her PhD thesis in Art Studies entitled «Volochyobnye (Christmas Carol) Songs of the East Slavs» (supervisor: Professor Marina A. Engovatova).
She began teaching at the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music in 2001. She is currently a leading specialist at the Gippius Centre for Music and Ethnography of the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music.
Her main professional interests concern folk music, in particular West‑Russian musical traditions. The «geography» of Svetlana A. Latysheva’s musical‑folklore expeditions includes numerous regions of Russia (Smolensk, Bryansk, Pskov, Tver, Oryol, Kaluga, and Belgorod) as well as adjacent territories in Belarus (Vitebsk and Mogilev regions).
She has taken part in research projects supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and the Russian Humanities Research Foundation, and since 2013 has been one of the participants in the project to create the Unified Electronic Catalogue of Objects of Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Peoples of the Russian Federation. She is a member of the organising committee of the International Folklore Festival Mayskie assamblei (Gnesin Russian Academy of Music).
Among Svetlana A. Latysheva’s major scholarly publications is the multivolume series Smolensky muzykalno‑etnografichesky sbornik, in which she is a member of the authorial team.
From 2014 to 2018 she taught in the Department of Applied Musical Arts, and since 2018 she has taught in the Department of Ethnomusicology.
