Kateryna Alymova is a cultural and music manager. She’s a Fulbright Scholar currently pursuing her second MA in Music Industry at the University of Miami, FL, USA.

Kateryna has organized over 100 music events in Ukraine and across EU countries, and has worked with major cultural and educational programs, including the EU-funded House of Europe. She is a co-founder of Kyiv Contemporary Music Days and the Zapravka Initiative for Art Residency Support. Kateryna also served as the Artistic Director of Jauna Muzika, one of the oldest international festivals of experimental and electroacoustic music in Lithuania.

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Kateryna Botanova is an independent cultural researcher and curator who lives and works between Ukraine and Switzerland. She writes and lectures on ecosystems, decoloniality, and solidarity in societal transformations and cultural practices. 

Currently, she is a head of analytics at the Frontier Institute, Kyiv, and an affiliated curator at the Research Platform of the PinchukArtCenter, Kyiv. She co-curates the Swiss multidisciplinary biennial Culturescapes, where she worked with the cultural landscapes of the Amazon and Northern and Western African regions (2019-2025). Since 2019, she has been a jury member and expert of the European Spaces of Culture program from EUNIC Global, which operates in more than 40 countries worldwide.

Botanova is a member of PEN Ukraine and a member of the advisory board of RUTA-Association for Central, Southeastern, Eastern European, Baltic, Caucasus, Central and Northern Asian Studies. 

The last book she edited, Reclaiming History. Decoloniality and Art in Ukraine after 1991, is coming out in the spring of 2025. In the summer of 2025, she will curate exhibitions Kherson. Embrace of the Steppe in Mystetskyi Arsenal (Kyiv) and Archipelago of History in PinchukArtCenter (Kyiv).

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Polina Bulat is a Ukrainian dance producer and manager based in Berlin, working internationally on production, distribution, and artistic collaboration with choreographers and institutions across Europe.

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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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Borys Filonenko is a сo-curator of the Ukrainian Pavilion in Venice, curator, art critic, editor-in-chief of ist publishing, an independent press in Kyiv specializing in contemporary art, theory, anthropology, design, and photography.

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Liza German is a curator and researcher with a PhD in art history. She has been a part of an independent curatorial collective with Maria Lanko since 2013. In collaboration with Maria Lanko and Borys Filonenko, Liza co-curated Fountain of Exhaustion, the project by Pavlo Makov presented at the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 59th La Biennale di Venezia in 2022. (The Art Margins interview with Maria about her journey to evacuate the artwork for the Biennale at the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine.)

Liza was a guest curator at the Liverpool Biennial (2016, UK). She co-edited the books The Art of the Ukrainian Sixties and Decommunized: Ukrainian Soviet Mosaics, contributed to the educational websites Cultural Project and Sense, and lectured on Contemporary Art at Kyiv Academy of Media Arts.

During the Art Prospect residency, Liza gave lectures on the history and theory of curation, lead a series of workshops on curating and preparing art projects (the basics of curatorial research, guidelines for putting together a display and writing wall texts, conventions of interacting with artists), and served as a consultant for ArtEast students’ final exhibition. German visited studios and local art institutions. She also studied museum collections in Bishkek and nearby cities as part of research for a book about the history of curation in Ukraine and other former Soviet countries.

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Olha Honchar is a cultural scholar. She is the Director of the Territory of Terror Memorial Museum of Totalitarian Regimes in Lviv and a founder and coordinator of the Museum Crisis Center initiative, which emerged in the first days of russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

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Kateryna Iakovlenko is a Luhansk-born writer and curator, currently a Digital Culture Editor-in-Chief of UPB Suspilne Media in Kyiv.

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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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Maryana Klochko is a music producer, vocalist, and film composer based in Kyiv, Ukraine. In her works, she often engages with the unconscious—through lyrics and vocal parts, she seeks a balance between the real and the fictional. She perceives music as storytelling, finding visual images within compositions that come to life through sound.

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Anna Kopylova is a cultural manager and organizer, former Director of the Voloshyn Gallery.

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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.

Olia Kotska designs and facilitates cultural and knowledge exchange across people, organizations, and networks. 

She leads Vidnova, a program framework that supports civil society actors from Ukraine through placements, labs, and community weaving, aiming to strengthen resilience and foster collaboration. Olia co-founded the Neighborhood Festival in Pidzamche (Lviv), coordinated cultural mapping projects across multiple Ukrainian cities and co-developed the Tandem for Culture program, connecting over 400 independent cultural organizations and 320 cultural managers across 160 cities in 35 countries. 

She also led Ecosystems Academies within the Thaqafa Daayer Maydoor, a program supporting cultural ecosystems in the Southern Neighbourhood, including Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Tunisia, and Morocco. Olia is active in global communities of practice, including the Human Systems Dynamics Institute, the School of System Change, and Open Space Technology, etc.

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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.

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. She focuses on the landscape and environmental transformations, human and non-human communities and networks, new media, and cultural heritage preservation.

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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Oleksandr Mykhed is a writer. Until March 2022, he lived in Kyiv; he is now enlisted in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He is the author of nine books; selected essays and excerpts from his books have been translated into ten languages. He has participated in literary residencies in Finland, Latvia, Iceland, the USA and France, and a virtual residency at Oxford University. He has written for publications including The Financial Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and The Guardian, and has appeared as a guest on CNN and NPR. Oleksandr’s book “The Language of War” was published by Penguin in 2024. He is a member of PEN Ukraine.

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Yevheniia Nesterovych is a cultural manager, critic, and author. She is the Director at the NGO Post Bellum Ukraine. In 2013-2018, Yevheniia co-edited the culture section of the online publication Zbruch. She served as program director at the NGO Art Council Dialogue in 2015-2020 and worked as a program coordinator at the Czech Center in Kyiv in 2021-22. In 2016, she co-authored the book “Summa” (Meridian Czernowitz) with Yuri Izdryk. Her essays, criticism, and cultural analysis appear in various media outlets.

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Anton Ovchinnikov is choreographer, performer, composer, lecturer, poet, and organizer of the annual international dance festival Zelyonka Space UP in Kyiv. Since 2008, he is the artistic director of the Black O!Range dance productions company. The company was recognized as one of the most distinctive and original dance projects in Ukraine. In 2015, Ovchinnikov cofounded All-Ukrainian Association “Contemporary Dance Platform”. Main objectives of the Association are to support young Ukrainian choreographers, integrate contemporary dance into the modern cultural life of Ukraine and establish the national center of contemporary dance. In 2016-2021 Anton Ovchinnikov presented a few solo performances and created four multidisciplinary projects. In 2017, he was an ArtsLink International Fellow. Since 2018, Anton Ovchinnikov is the member of the expert panel of Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.

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On creating work during war
Monochrome
Conversation with Anton Ovchinnikov and dance critic Polina Bulat, both from Ukraine, moderated by Simon Dove of CEC ArtsLink as part of BIPOD 22

Bozhena Pelenska is Director of the Jam Factory Art Center, a new multi-disciplinary contemporary art center in a former industrial building in Lviv, Ukraine. Bozhena is responsible for the Art Center’s development strategy, program development, management, and institutional development. She developed the concept and program activities of the Art Center. Bozhena studied Cultural Studies, Art History, Philosophy and Art Management. She has participated in international programs of cultural management, cultural diplomacy and exchange programs. A graduate of the University of Lviv and the University of Ottawa with a degree in Cultural Studies, Bozhena is currently a graduate student at the DeVos Institute of Arts Management, University of Maryland.

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Oleksii Podat is a distinctive voice in Ukraine’s experimental music scene. He is known for his radical approaches to sound production, blending avant-garde playfulness with raw sonic intensity. His self-proclaimed genre, melodic noise, has become a defining element of his artistic identity, pushing the boundaries of contemporary composition. Oleksii is from Sloviansk, Ukraine.

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Daria Prydybailo is an art historian, cultural manager, and curator from Kyiv. She has worked at leading cultural institutions in Ukraine and Germany such as the National Art and Culture Museum Complex Mystetskyi Arsenal and the National Museum for Contemporary Art Hamburger Bahnhof. Among her curated exhibitions are “Squeezed in Infinity,” “Seeing Without Light” (co-curated with Sam Bardaouil), and “War/She.” Besides, she has run non-institutional projects such as Transitory White magazine on art and activism in Eastern Europe, Caucasus, and Central Asia and the international feminist platform womanorial. She worked on large-scale international exhibitions such as the International Forum Art Kyiv and the First Kyiv Biennale of Contemporary Art ARSENALE 2012.

She is the founder of the cultural NGO Art Matters Ukraine, working on the development of cross-cultural dialogue, supporting independent artistic voices, and strengthening post-colonial discourse in the contemporary art world.

As a singer and songwriter, she has a music project called Kyiv Siren. Daria contributes a monthly column on Ukrainian art to the regional newspaper “Ridnyj Kraj,” Ukraine.

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Kateryna Radchenko, Ukrainian curator and director of Odesa Photo Days Festival, works directly with photographers at the frontlines. Currently, Kateryna is collecting and curating photos from the war zone in order to produce international publications, exhibitions, events and create opportunities for people around the world to experience these visual stories and narratives first hand. Throughout the heated days of war, Kateryna and her team work as an aid for international media outlets in Odesa and Lviv, supporting photographers who are stuck, in danger or go to the frontlines as independent artists.

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Dr. Kateryna Rietz-Rakul is the Head of the Representative Office of the Ukrainian Institute in Germany. She is an interpreter, translator, writer and cultural manager. Kateryna lives and works in Berlin, where she has been setting up and running the representative office of the Ukrainian Institute for the past two years. 

Previously, she was a co-founder of APES, a curatorial collective in Berlin. Kateryna Rietz-Rakul has contributed to numerous international art magazines and published several books, including a guide to the Berlin cultural scene, Berlin Contemporary Art. As a cultural manager, Kateryna Rietz-Rakul is co-founder of KUL’TURA e.V., which promotes international cooperation between creatives from Ukraine and other countries. She studied English and American Studies in Lviv and Berlin and holds a PhD in contemporary literature.

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A cultural policy expert and manager, Olha Sahaidak is a Chairwoman of the Coalition for Cultural Actors.

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Georg Schöllhammer is editor-in-chief of springerin – Hefte für Gegenwartskunst and has worked internationally on cultural projects such as documenta, Manifesta, the Venice Biennials, São Paulo, Gyumri and The School of Kiev 2015, Kyiv Biennial 2023 and 2025, Sweet Sixties, L’internationale, Former West, Wiener Festwochen and the Vienna Fair. He is the founder of ‘The Július Koller Society’. From 1988 to 1994 he was editor for visual arts at the newspaper Der Standard. Schöllhammer has been the director of tranzit.at since 2004 and is one of the initiators of Office Ukraine. 

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Veronika Seleha is a CEO of the creative agency BICKERSTAFF.OOO producing campaigns for business and government development in Ukraine and internationally. She is also part of the strategic development group at the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, an important religious and cultural center in Ukraine. Veronika served as the Director General of the Directorate for Humanitarian Policy at the Presidential Office of Ukraine.

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Kateryna Semenyuk is a cultural manager, curator, co-founder of the Past / Future / Art memory culture platform, and head of the NGO Cultural Practices.

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Volodymyr Sheiko is the Director General of Ukrainian Institute Kyiv. He is a specialist in culture management, marketing and communications. Volodymyr held senior positions in the Ukrainian mission of the British Council for 11 years. He organized numerous cultural projects and events in the UK and 15 European countries: exhibitions, art residencies, film festivals, professional internships, concerts, literary programs, trainings, and theater productions.

A graduate of the Institute of International Relations of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Volodymyr received a professional diploma in marketing in 2009, and in 2014 – a diploma in digital marketing from the The Chartered Institute of Marketing (UK). In 2011, he graduated from the Summer School of Scottish Universities SUISS in the field of “Contemporary British and Irish Literature” (Edinburgh, Scotland). Volodymyr is a Member of the 2016 Summer School of Global Governance; the international network of Bucerius Summer School (ZEIT-Stiftung, Hamburg, Germany); and the IETM International Professional Performing Arts Network and the Total Theater Network.

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Liubov Shuba is the Head of Information Department at the Memorial Museum of Totalitarian Regimes “Territory of Terror” in Lviv.

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Katya Taylor is a curator, culture manager, lecturer, mentor. Advisor to the Minister at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine on Public Diplomacy. Founder of the NGO and cultural management agency Port of Culture, curator of the HeForShe Arts Week Kyiv 2018 & 2019, author of Women in Arts Award for UN Women (Ukraine). Author of the book Turnkey art: Management and Marketing of Culture and Art Management course at SKVOT.

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Les Vynogradov is a cultural manager, writer, musician, and game designer from Kyiv, Ukraine. He is currently a Weltoffenes Berlin fellow with Initiative Neue Musik Berlin (INM). Les is a project manager at Kyiv Contemporary Music Days, running the Instrumental grant program and Contemporary Classical Music Portfolio UA. He is the co-founder of Zapravka Initiative for Art Residency Support. Previously, he was the Head of Visual Art at the Ukrainian Institute and helped launch the EXTER residency program; Visualise exhibition support program; and Ukraine Everywhere, a program promoting the visual culture of Ukraine online. 

Les is the co-founder of Heden Smugglers, an indie game studio working on an adventure title Hedenite. He has a solo music project anom and is a member of the doom metal band Vin de Mia Trix. Les is contributing a monthly column, Follow the Fellow, to INM’s field notes online magazine. 

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Hnat Zabrodskyy is a senior-level manager in the field of culture, a legal expert with more than ten years of expertise, and an organizational transformation and development specialist. Hnat leads legal operations at the Museum of Contemporary Art MOCA NGO and the Pavilion of Culture CF. He also leads the UALR project focused on developing new regulations and institutions for a sustainable framework for the emergent Ukrainian cultural ecosystem. Hnat is continuously engaged in the development of common memory practices and dialogue-related projects as an independent expert and as a senior scholar for the Kyiv School of Economics.

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