Olena Afanasieva is culture manager and civic society leader working towards culture development of Ukrainian society. Her practice focuses on the strengthening of capacities and empowerment of local creative community and on building cross-border culture dialog and cooperation. She is also is the leader of the NGO “Centre of Cultural Development “Totem”, co-founder of the art space “Urban CAD” (Creativity. Art. Development) created in Kherson in 2016 at the former industrial space using practices of art-revitalisation.

Olena is curator and art-manager of art projects in Ukraine and abroad and a manager of “Three points” art-residency in the Kherson region. As culture manager, she organized large-scale festivals in Kherson and curated exhibitions on local, national and international levels. She focused on Ukrainian identity and revision of culture & historical narratives.

On February 24, 2022 Olena was forced to leave her hometown of Kherson due to its occupation by the Russian army.

Kateryna Alymova is a cultural and educational manager. Throughout her career, she has held various positions that have contributed to her professional growth, such as organising and overseeing international music projects in Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, and Portugal, working with EU programmes in the field of culture, and managing non-governmental organizations. Kateryna is a co-founder of the culture and educational platform Kyiv Contemporary Music Days and artistic director of the international music festival “Jauna Muzika”.

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Ieva Astahovska is an art scholar, critic and curator. She works at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, where she leads research projects related to art and culture in (post)socialist period, and entanglements between postsocialist and postcolonial perspective in the Baltics and Eastern Europe.Her recently curated and co-curated exhibitions include Decolonial Ecologies. Understanding Postcololonial after Socialism at Riga Art Space (2022–23), Difficult Pasts: Connected Worlds at the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius (2022) and the Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga (2020), Ecosystems of Change in the public space of Riga (2021).

Ieva has also edited a number of research-based publications including Valdis Āboliņš: The avant-garde, mailart, the New Left and cultural relations during the Cold War (LCCA, 2019), and Revisiting Footnotes: Footprints of the Recent Past in the Post-Socialist Region (LCCA, 2015). Her research interests also include subjects such as contemporarity and historicity, relations between history and memory, peripheries, art and ecology.

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From Donetsk to Mariupol to Kyiv, Ukraine, Diana Berg transformed her practice from activist to artist, curator, and cultural manager amidst war and displacement. Founder of Mariupol’s Platform Tu, she has been working with gender inequality and human rights issues through art, persisting in activism and cultural preservation after being displaced twice by war. Diana’s work exploring topics of memory and war has gained national and international recognition. At documenta fifteen, she coordinated the 3-day Ukrainian program. Diana is currently developing a project on the environmental crises in the east of Ukraine affected by Russian ecocide. She is committed to leveraging art for social justice and environmental awareness.

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Kateryna Botanova is a Ukrainian cultural critic, curator, and writer based in Basel, Switzerland. She is a co-curator of CULTURESCAPES, a Swiss multidisciplinary biennial, and an editor of the critical anthologies that accompany each festival, among them Culturescapes 2021 Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology; On the Edge: Culturescapes 2019 Poland; Culturescapes 2023: Sahara (upcoming). 

Kateryna was also a director of CSM/Foundation Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv, where, in 2010, she launched and edited Korydor, the online journal on contemporary culture. She has worked extensively with EU Eastern Partnership Culture Program and EUNIC Global as a consultant and expert. 

A member of PEN Ukraine, she publishes widely on arts and culture.  Recently, Kateryna’s essays and articles appeared in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Eurozine, Osteuropa, Various Artists, Dwutygodnik, Tagesspiegel, Atlantic Council, and more. Her essays have been included in Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art. Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021. Ibidem, 2021; Future We Are Longing For. Tempora, 2020; Bridges Not Walls: What Unites Ukrainians. VSL, 2020. More to read here linktr.ee/kbotanova

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Photo by Bettina Matthiessen for Culturescapes

Nien-Ting Chen is an independent curator and visual artist. She works across cities in Asia and Europe, with her research, artistic practice focusing on developing strategies to bring young artists onto the world stage through the exchange and combination of resources. Nien-Ting is focusing on several interconnected art and curatorial projects in the United Kingdom, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Ukraine, promoting the Taiwanese arts and cultural scene within the global landscape of contemporary art.

Nien-Ting holds a Master of Fine Art from the Glasgow School of Art (GSA,GU), UK and currently pursuing her PhD in Art at the Liverpool School of Art and Design (LSA, LJMU). Her doctoral research delves into the objective analysis and evaluation of how the Chinese ethnic (overseas Chinese) has impacted the advancement of global contemporary art, particularly in the broader Asia, since the 1990s. By reviewing the retrospective frameworks of Asian contemporary art’s development, she aims to outline the evolution of the contemporary art movement in the last three decades, while drawing links between the cultural, historical, political and geographical development of various regions in Asia.

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Olena Chervonik is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Oxford, writing her dissertation on the early history of photography. Currently Olena cooperates with the Museum of Kharkiv School of Photography (MOKSOP) as an academic editor and translator of the series on the history and theory of photography.

Previously, Olena received her master’s degree in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts in New York and an ABD in Slavic languages and literatures and art history from the University of Kansas. She also worked as a curator of contemporary art in a number of institutions, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art (USA), Izolyatsia, the Platform for Cultural Initiatives (Donets, Ukraine), Videonale, the Festival of Video Art in Kunstmuseum Bonn (Germany), and the Spencer Museum of Art in Kansas (USA).

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Iryna Chuzhynova is the Director of the Directorate of Arts & Culture in the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine. She is also a member and co-founder of NGO’s “Coalition of Cultural Actors” and the author more than 300 publications in newspapers & magazines about both the Ukrainian and European theatre process.

Iryna holds a Ph.D. in Theater Art. From 2019 till 2021, she served as a head of the analytical department of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation, a state-owned institution with the aim to facilitate development of culture and arts in Ukraine. In 2016-2019, she acted as a curator from the Ukrainian side of an all-Ukrainian competition Taking the Stage (a theatre program of the British Council in Ukraine). Prior to this, from 2012 to 2015, Iryna was a co-founder and curator of the Les Kurbas Ukrainian Emerging Directors Festival in Kyiv.

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Andrii Dostliev is an artist, curator, and photography researcher from Ukraine, currently based in Poland. His primary areas of interest are memory, trauma, identity — both personal and collective, and limits of photography as a medium. Andrii’s art practice works across photography, video, drawing, performance, and installation. He has published several photobooks. Andrii’s work is held in a number of private collections nationally and internationally. He has degrees in IT and graphic design.

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Lia Dostlieva is an artist, cultural anthropologist, and essayist who works across a range of media, including photography, installation, and textile sculptures. Lia’s artistic and research practice engages with the issues of collective trauma, Anthropocene, decoloniality, and the agency of vulnerable groups. She has exhibited work at the Ludwig Museum (Budapest, Hungary), National Gallery of Art (Vilnius, Lithuania), Tbilisi Photography and Multimedia Museum (Tbilisi, Sakartvelo), National Museum of Fine Arts (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan), Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga, Latvia). Her curatorial projects include the 10th Triennale of Young Polish Art (Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, Poland, 2023) and ‘Reconstruction of Memory’ (DOX, Prague, Czech Republic, 2017; IZOLYATSIA, Kyiv, Ukraine 2016). In 2022-23, she was a participant of the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, Netherlands) and a 2019 Visiting Fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna, Austria). Lia also writes for publications, including e-flux Journal, Eurozine magazine, Kajet Journal, and Blok Magazine. Originally from Donetsk, Ukraine, Lia is currently in Poznan, Poland.

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Anna Gaidai is a curator and manager of cultural and educational projects in Ukraine and internationally. The focus of her practice is collaborative projects in visual art and multidisciplinary projects, residencies, and cultural diplomacy. For last three years, Anna has been working as a curator and contemporary visual arts project manager at Jam Factory Art Center (JFAC) in Lviv, Ukraine. One of the projects she is curating at JFAC is the community-oriented art residencies within MagiC Carpets International Platform (Creative Europe).

Anna is also a co-author of Policy Brief “Visual Culture and Photography: Developing a Balanced Ecosystem in Ukraine”, an assessor of the international portfolio reviews at European photo festivals, and a member of the jury of art contest. Anna is also the co-founder of the NGO PhotoCULT Cultural Center and co-organizer of numerous exhibitions and international festivals of photography and visual culture (Kyiv, Chernihiv, Lviv, Dnipro, Munich) as well as international portfolio reviews in Ukraine (2011-2022). One of the projects that she has recently curated is the “Open Letter. Naked Emotions” project, which is a photography/ mail art exhibition. Anna was also a participant of Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Kassel, Germany (2022).

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Mykhailo Glubokyi is the development director of “IZOLYATSIA“, a platform for cultural initiatives that was established in 2010, and which was originally located in a former insulation materials factory in Donetsk, Ukraine. The organization aims to effect systemic change in Ukrainian society and implements projects on the local and European levels.

During the last decade, IZOLYATSIA became a symbol of the resilience of the Ukrainian cultural sector and continues to champion democratic values based on the belief that cultural institutions are pillars of a free democratic society. Mykhailo has been a part of the foundation since 2011, implementing site-specific, participatory community-oriented cultural projects and turning various industrial places into vibrant cultural spaces. Since 2021, he has also been a board member of one of the oldest European networks of cultural centres, Trans Europe Halles, and a member of the consortium implementing the Creative Europe mobility scheme for artists and cultural professionals, “i-Portunus”. Ever since 2019, Mykhailo has focused on collaboration with local communities, capacity building for rural areas, support for cultural decentralization and international collaborations, programs, and exchanges, especially in East of Ukraine and Eastern and Central European regions. Also, beginning in 2014, he had been involved in developing the IZONE creative hub as well as residencies and educational programs for creative entrepreneurs, artists, and cultural professionals.

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Olena Honcharuk is the acting general director of the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre, the Ukrainian state film archive. The organization is a center for film conservation, a research and presenting institution, a film museum, mediatheque, and art cluster all under the same roof.

Olena began at Dovzhenko Centre as exhibition manager, then later joined the creation of the Film Museum and lately became its leader. Her museum career began in 2013 in museum communications at the National Art Museum of Ukraine. Olena firmly believes that the voice of cultural and liberal institutions should be more audible, more powerful to shape and support values, thus contributing to society’s development.

Embracing ideas of consumption, gender, love, power, protest culture, experience of war, plants and dogs, Alevtina Kakhidze is co-founder of a residency program for international artists in the village of Muzychi, The Muzychi Expanded History Project.

To raise awareness of climate change and more sustainable living in the era of global shifts in society, especially in post-pandemic times, she has initiated the laboratory Adult Garden to observe coexistence and the dynamics of plants freed from the gardener’s intervention.

During her ArtsLink International Fellowship 2020 (virtual and in-person residencies), Alevtina and her US collaborators embarked on a garden-focused project that centers on critical observation of organized experimental gardens and natural conservation areas. The artists and scientists from University of Kansas studied the competition and collaboration observable among plants and between plants and living organisms such as insects and birds.  Studies focused on the interaction between native and non-native (including invasive) plants, and explored the cases when a plant native to the US became invasive in Ukraine and vice versa. Alevtina also studied traditional Native American practices of gardening and medicinal plant use.

In Alevtina’s third year of ArtsLink International Fellowship in 2022, she is planning a collaboration with the Kansas University School of Visual Art on the project ‘Fate of Plants’. She will continue to research stable systems – prairies in Kansas, a steppe in Ukraine and the restored plant systems on the edge of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone – to generate new work, a series of texts for art and scientific publications and an online discussion. The project has been postponed until the end of war in Ukraine.

The artist profile in the Burlington Contemporary magazine, July 27, 2022
“With the Russian invasion in February 2022, Kakhidze’s art became more radical. Her critique of the war continues to be enacted through a personal lens, however her anti-colonialist narratives are more explicit and her reference points are wider, articulating the violence and imminent danger that characterize life for so many in Ukraine.” (Svitlana Biedarieva, Burlington Contemporary, July 27, 2022)

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Alona Karavai is a co-founder of numerous art organizations, including Insha Osvita, residency house Khata-Maysternya, agency proto produkciia, the gallery Asortymentna kimnata, and of the art media outlet covering art post impreza. She is also a social investor at Urban Space 500, and a co-organizer of the Porto Franko festival.

Alona studied organizational development in TU Kaiserslautern. Her professional interests are cultural management and curating, visual art and music, organizational development and various educational products.

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Photo by Valentyn Kuzan

Nataliia Kernytska is the International Cooperation Manager of the “Zapravka” Initiative at the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation (UCF), which she joined in 2019. For two years she led the program “Culture. Tourism. Regions”.

Nataliia is currently engaged in establishing partnerships with local and international organizations, as well as developing a number of projects, such as The Chronicles of the Cultural Front, “Help to save Ukrainian culture now!”, the UCF Award, and others.

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Born in Kyiv, Tatiana Kochubinska is an independent curator, writer, and lecturer, whose work focuses on Ukrainian contemporary art. She has worked as a curator on the Research Platform of the PinchukArtCentre and on the center’s exhibition and publication programs.  As a curator, Tatiana is particularly interested in questions of responsibility, Soviet history and its relationship to today’s society. In recent years, she has collaborated with various cultural institutions, designed courses on contemporary art, co-developed curatorial residencies together with Artsvit Gallery (Dnipro, Ukraine), and co-edited a special issue about Ukrainian art and society after 2014 at the invitation of Obieg Magazine. Tatiana also became a member of the curatorial team of the International Coalition of Cultural Workers Against the War in Ukraine antiwarcoalition.art.

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Yulia Kostereva is an artist and curator. Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Yulia relocated to Warsaw, Poland, where she coordinated the Emergency Residencies program to support cultural workers seeking refuge from the war. Currently, Yulia manages the program Сильні Разом/Strong Together implemented by the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, and the Open Place platform of interdisciplinary practices within the framework of Culture Helps/Культура допомагає project.

Yulia works with installations, objects and joint actions, history and stories related to a place, an object or a person. Her practice encompasses visual arts and the art of interaction.

Together with the artist Yuriy Kruchak, Yulia co-founded the art platform Open Place which has been operating in Kyiv since 1999. She studied at the theatre stage design department of the Kharkiv State Art School, the graphics department of the Kharkiv Art and Industrial Institute, and the graphics department of the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture.

Kateryna Kravchuk is a certified facilitator and co-founder of Lanka.pro. She worked as a program manager, researcher and evaluation expert for multiple projects focusing on culture, creative economy, and local development.  Since 2017, Kateryna has been a workshop associate for the Creative Enterprise Ukraine Programme. Since 2020, she has also been a member of the International Association of Facilitators.

Currently, Kateryna is based in Lviv, Ukraine. She has a background in cultural studies and economics, and her professional interest includes cross-sector cooperation in culture, system innovations, and sustainable development.

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Yuriy Kruchak is an artist whose professional interests include interdisciplinary and post‑artistic practices, intensification of connections between the artistic process and various strata of modern society. He works on the fringes between art and social studies, and his practice addresses the relationship of art to reality , with a special focus on the relationship of the artist to the audience. Yuriy also works as a curator and organizer. He is a co-founder of the interdisciplinary platform Open Place in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Yuriy’s artistic strategies depend on a specific issue and often engage different communities in the creative process. His works in public spaces transform the audience into the actors, creating a community whose behavior and interaction serves to interpret and reveal social structures in an urban environment.

Yuriy studied Scenography at Kharkiv State Art College (1989 -1991), Environmental design at the Kharkiv art-industrial institute (currently Kharkiv State academy of Design and Arts) (1991-1996). He received a Master degree in Painting from the National Academy of Fine Art and Architecture in Kyiv (1999). Got the scholarship Gaude Polonia (National Center for Culture Poland) in 2018.

Lesia Kulchynska, PhD, is a Kyiv-based art curator and visual studies researcher currently affiliated with Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History. She taught Cultural Studies and Media Studies at the Kyiv Academy of Media Arts, worked as a researcher at Pinchuk Art Center, as well as a curator at the Visual Culture Research Center and Set Independent Art Space (Kyiv). Lesia curated the The School of the Lonesome chapter at The Kyiv Biennial 2015 “The School of Kyiv”.

In 2018-19, she was a Fulbright Scholar residing at New York University. Her research interests are the theory and history of the image.

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Maria Lanko is a curator and researcher focusing on the (unwritten) history of Ukrainian contemporary art. She is co-founder of The Naked Room, a space in Kyiv that integrates a gallery with a bookshop and a bar. The gallery program focuses on emerging artists with an ambition to introduce them in the art market both nationally and internationally. The Naked Room collaborates with several established artists and/or estates to procure recognition of their early work and archives as well as revisit forgotten or unrealized projects. As part of this practice, in 2022 in collaboration with Lizaveta German and Borys Filonenko, Maria co-curated the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. The exhibition traced a 30-year history of “Fountain of Exhaustion” by Pavlo Makov and produced the piece for the first time since its conception. (In this Art Margins interview, Maria talks about the journey to evacuate the artwork for the Biennale at the beginning of the russian war against Ukraine.) She lives and works in Kyiv. 

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Photo by Oleh Pashkovsky

Anastasiia Manuliak is the head of Visual Culture at the Ukrainian Institute, where she represents the Visual Arts sector and runs several programs, including the international exhibition support program Visualise. Prior to joining the Institute in 2019, she worked as a cultural manager and independent curator. In 2019, she co-curated the National Biennale for Young Art “Looks like I’m Entering Our Garden” in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

Anastasiia is a graduate of the FLEX exchange program funded by the US government. She also graduated with honors from the Department of History and Theory of Arts at the Lviv National Academy of Arts and the Department of Economics and Management at the European University in Kyiv. She is one of the art experts who participated at the Ukrainian Culture Foundation in 2022.

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Natalia Matsenko is an independent curator, art critic, and lecturer who lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Natalia curated the exhibition “UNFOLDING LANDSCAPES: Landscape and Poetics in Contemporary Ukrainian Art” (Art Center Silkeborg Bad, Denmark / Royal Museum of Art and History, Brussels / Kunst(Zeug)Haus, Rapperswil, Switzerland, 2022). She also curated the public program and exhibition “Let’s talk about something else” (Kunstmuseum Bochum, Germany, 2022). Since 2018, she has been cooperating with the Landart Symposium “Mohrytsia: The Border Space”, and was a co-curator of the exhibition “Larger Space” (CCA YermilovCenter, Kharkiv, 2019), and of the project “SO WHAT ABOUT THE MAMMOTH? Mohrytsia Epilogue” (The Naked Room Gallery, Kyiv, 2021).

Natalia’s past curatorial projects include an international art residency BIRUCHIY Contemporary Art Project (“The Habitable Zone”, 2013; “Irshansk. Recreation”, 2015; “From a Common Root”, 2016 (Klementowice, Poland / Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv); BIRUCHIY TRANSCARPATHIA 022. ART WAR (2022, The House of Social Innovation, Warszawa), and others.

Born in Cherkasy, Ukraine, Natalia graduated from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts with a master’s degree in theory and history of art.

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