Ukrainians on Ukraine

Born and raised in Ukraine, Katya Grokhovsky is an artist, curator, and Founding Director of The Immigrant Artist Biennial. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Grokhovsky has received support through numerous residencies including Sculpture Space, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program, School of Visual Arts MFA Art Practice Artist in Residence, Pratt Fine Arts Department Artist in Residence, Art and Law Fellowship, The Museum of Arts and Design Studio Program, BRICworkspace, Ox-BOW, Wassaic Artist Residency, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Studios at MASS MoCA, NARS Residency, and more. She has been awarded the New American Fellowship, Brooklyn Arts Council Grants, NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship, ArtSlant 2017 Prize, Asylum Arts Grant, among others.

Curator, political activist and scholar Vasyl Cherepanyn is head of the award-winning Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC), an institution founded in Kyiv in 2008 as a platform for collaboration among academic, artistic, and activist communities. He holds a PhD in philosophy (aesthetics), has lectured at numerous universities, and was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna in 2016. He coedited Guidebook of the Kyiv International (Medusa Books, 2018) and ’68 NOW (Archive Books, 2019), and curated The European International (Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, 2018) and Hybrid Peace (Stroom, The Hague, 2019). VCRC is the organizer of the Kyiv Biennial and a founding member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance.

A first generation Ukrainian American, Adriana Farmiga is an interdisciplinary artist and Associate Dean at the Cooper Union School of Art in NY, whose practice extends into spaces of: education, curating, and community advocacy. Farmiga received an MFA from Bard College in 2004, and has shown in group and solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times and Artforum, among other publications, and ranges from conceptual still life to video and mixed media sculpture.

Kyiv- based filmmaker and writer based, Oleksiy Radynski’s award- winning films have been screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Docudays IFF, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), and S A V V Y Contemporary (Berlin), among others. After graduating from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, he studied at the Home Workspace Program (Ashkal Alwan, Beirut). In 2008, he cofounded Visual Culture Research Center, an initiative for art, knowledge, and politics in Kyiv. His texts have been published in Proxy Politics: Power and Subversion in a Networked Age (Archive Books, 2017), Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and East Europe: A Critical Anthology (MoMA, 2018), Being Together Precedes Being (Archive Books, 2019), and e-flux journal.

Scholar Kateryna Ruban is a PhD candidate in history at New York University, finishing a dissertation about abortions in the Soviet Union. Earlier, she earned masters degrees in Central European University in Hungary and in Kyiv Mohyla Academy in Ukraine. Before coming to the US, Kateryna was a part of the Visual Culture Research Center in Kyiv. Working and living in Ukraine and the US, she has published numerous short articles on current political events in both Ukrainian and English. In Fall 2022, Kateryna will be teaching the course “Ukraine in Wartime” at Arizona State University.

Born in Ukraine, Slinko is a multidisciplinary artist living in the USA. Her practice is rooted in travel and research, and is informed by history and social anthropology. Slinko works across several disciplines, and incorporates forms ranging from political satire to storyboard drawings, moving image, performance, and fieldwork research. Slinko has been awarded the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, and several residencies, including Skowhegan, Henry Street Settlement, Dar al Ma’mûn (Morocco), IZOLYATSIA Foundation (Kyiv), Santa Fe Art Institute, BANFF Centre, Triangle Arts and many more.