Vera Dulova was a Soviet and Russian harpist and teacher. She was born in Moscow on 27 January 1909, although some sources give 1910. She came from the old but impoverished Dulov family; her father, Georgy Dulov, was a violinist, and her mother, Maria Dulova, was a singer at the Mariinsky Theatre.
Dulova studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Ksenia Erdeli from 1920 to 1922 and Maria Korchinskaya from 1922 to 1925. From 1927 to 1929, she continued her training in Berlin with Max Saal on a scholarship from the Fund for Assistance to Young Talents. She was a soloist with the Moscow Philharmonic from 1929 to 1931 and a soloist in the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra from 1932 to 1961 and again from 1964 to 1984. Beginning in the 1930s, she also maintained an extensive concert career. In 1935, she shared first prize in the harp category at the Second All-Union Competition of Performing Musicians in Leningrad, and she performed solo harp parts in many ballets staged at the Bolshoi Theatre.
Her repertoire comprised more than 300 works. Alexander Mosolov dedicated his Dance Suite of 1946 to her, and she was also the dedicatee of works by Sergei Vasilenko, Lev Knipper, Evgeny Golubev, and other Soviet composers. She gave the first performances in Russia of many works by contemporary foreign composers, including Paul Hindemith, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Benjamin Britten, and André Jolivet. Dulova also wrote numerous arrangements and transcriptions for harp, recorded for radio, gramophone records, and compact discs, and toured widely in the Soviet Union and abroad, including in the United Kingdom, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Japan, the United States, Israel, Czechoslovakia, China, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Australia.
Before the Second World War, Dulova taught at the Ippolitov-Ivanov Music College. From 1943 she taught harp at the Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservatory and at the Central Music School attached to the conservatory, becoming a professor in 1958. Among her pupils were Elena Moskvitina, Olga Ortenberg, Nadezhda Shameyeva, Tatiana Tauer, Irina Pashinskaya, Olga Eldarova, Lyudmila Snegiryova-Muster, Tatiana Vymyatnina, Anna Verkholantseva, Ksenia Mikhailova, and Ilona Nokelainen. Two of her pupils, Alexander Kaplyuk and Sergei Maikov, designed the first Soviet harp to enter serial production in 1948. She gave master classes internationally and took part in a harp-performance seminar at the School of Advanced Studies at the University of Hartford in the United States. A documentary, At the Lessons of Professor V. G. Dulova, was made in 1986.
In 1964, on her initiative, the All-Russian Society of Harpists was founded at the Central House of Arts Workers. She chaired the jury of the First International Harp Competition in Moscow in 1997 and served regularly as a chair or jury member for harp competitions. Her book, The Art of Harp Playing, was published in Moscow in 1973. Her distinctions included the USSR State Prize in 1973 and the title People's Artist of the USSR in 1976. Dulova died in Moscow on 5 January 2000 and was buried in Kuntsevo Cemetery. Since 2000, Moscow has hosted the Vera Dulova International Harp Festival-Competition.