The Reconstruction
of Ukraine

Ruination / Representation / Solidarity

( please, click to expand )

core organising team

Daša Anosova

(UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies)
Daša is a researcher and cultural worker from Kyiv, Ukraine. She is the 2020/2021 Chevening cohort alumna; graduated from King’s College London with an MA in Education in the Arts and Cultural Settings. She developed a number of art and cultural projects as a part of self-organised Ukrainian art collectives and continuously collaborated with a Ukrainian press IST publishing as an editor and translator. She’s been teaching at the Kyiv Academy of Media Arts since 2019 and at the British Council Ukraine in 2016-2019. She is a PhD candidate at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Her current research is focused on the operational strategies and aesthetic-political vocabulary developed by Ukrainian art and cultural initiatives in exile.

Sofia Dyak

(Center for Urban History, Lviv)
Dr. Sofia Dyak is a director of the Center for Urban History (Ukraine), an institution focusing on research, digital and public history, and educational programs. Her research interests include post-war history of border cities, heritage and urban planning in socialist cities and their legacies. Another area of her work is public history, including curating exhibitions and spatial commemorative projects in urban context. Dr. Dyak was a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Historical Dialogue and Accountability Program at Columbia University and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Currently she is also a senior research fellow at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam.

Marta Kuzma

(Yale School of Art)
Marta Kuzma is a tenured Professor of Art in Critical Practice at the Yale School of Art, where she had served as the first woman to be appointed Dean from 2016 through 2021. Previous to her tenure as Dean at Yale School of Art, Professor Kuzma had served as the Chancellor of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in Sweden, the Director of the Office of Contemporary Art in Oslo in Norway, and the founding Director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv from 1990 – 2000. Earlier in her career she directed the international exhibitions department under Cornell Capa at the International Center of Photography. In addition to serving as a tenured Professor of Art at the Yale School of Art, Kuzma is a visiting Professor in Art Theory in the Graduate Program of Visual Arts in the University of Architecture (IUAV) in Venice, Italy and at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. She holds a post graduate degree in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy in London and an undergraduate degree from Barnard College in NYC.

Michał Murawski

(School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London)
Michał Murawski is an anthropologist of architecture and cities. He is Associate Professor of Critical Area Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His first book, The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw and a City Transfixed was published by Indiana University Press in 2019; and he is currently working on completing his second book, a critical study of politics and architecture in post-Soviet Russia. He is Director of the UCL SSEES FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity; and convenor of PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics in the Global East), a seminar and events platform based at UCL.

Daniel Roche

(Kean University School of Public Architecture)
Daniel Jonas-Roche is an adjunct professor of architecture, curator, and writer in New York City. Originally from Boston, his research focuses included socialist art and architecture, and U.S. labor history. His forthcoming book is entitled, ‘The Sloanist City: Alfred Sloan, Post-Fordism, and American Apartheid’ (DOM publishers, Berlin). His academic writings have been published by Princeton University, Rice University, and include forthcoming publications with the University of Puerto Rico and the MIT School of Architecture. He contributes to the Architects Newspaper and New York Review of Architecture, and is currently a lecturer at Kean University School of Public Architecture.

( 9 September 2022 )

Introduction

Oleksandra Azarkhina

(Ministery of Infrastructure of Ukraine)
Deputy Minister of infrastructure (rebuild, strategic planning, logistics).

Marta Kuzma

(Yale School of Art)
Marta Kuzma is a tenured Professor of Art in Critical Practice at the Yale School of Art, where she had served as the first woman to be appointed Dean from 2016 through 2021. Previous to her tenure as Dean at Yale School of Art, Professor Kuzma had served as the Chancellor of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in Sweden, the Director of the Office of Contemporary Art in Oslo in Norway, and the founding Director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv from 1990 – 2000. Earlier in her career she directed the international exhibitions department under Cornell Capa at the International Center of Photography. In addition to serving as a tenured Professor of Art at the Yale School of Art, Kuzma is a visiting Professor in Art Theory in the Graduate Program of Visual Arts in the University of Architecture (IUAV) in Venice, Italy and at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. She holds a post graduate degree in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy in London and an undergraduate degree from Barnard College in NYC.

Michał Murawski

(School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London)
Michał Murawski is an anthropologist of architecture and cities. He is Associate Professor of Critical Area Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His first book, The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw and a City Transfixed was published by Indiana University Press in 2019; and he is currently working on completing his second book, a critical study of politics and architecture in post-Soviet Russia. He is Director of the UCL SSEES FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity; and convenor of PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics in the Global East), a seminar and events platform based at UCL.

Sofia Dyak

(Center for Urban History, Lviv)
Dr. Sofia Dyak is a director of the Center for Urban History (Ukraine), an institution focusing on research, digital and public history, and educational programs. Her research interests include post-war history of border cities, heritage and urban planning in socialist cities and their legacies. Another area of her work is public history, including curating exhibitions and spatial commemorative projects in urban context. Dr. Dyak was a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Historical Dialogue and Accountability Program at Columbia University and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Currently she is also a senior research fellow at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam.

Beginnings

Ostap Slyvynsky

Ostap Slyvynsky is a Ukrainian poet, translator, essayist, and literary critic. He authored five books of poetry and was awarded several Ukrainian and international literary prizes. He translates fiction and non-fiction from Polish, English, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Belarusian, and Russian into Ukrainian.

Kateryna Iakovlenko

(UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies)
Kateryna Iakovlenko is a Luhansk-born Ukrainian visual art researcher and writer. She is ADB in New Media and Communication (focused on the heroic narrative of the Donbas in Soviet and post-Soviet media and art). She worked as a reporter and a deputy web editor of “The Day Newspaper” (2012-14), as a curator and a program manager of the Donbas Studies Research Project at Izolyatsia (2014-15), and as a researcher and a curator of public programs at PinchukArtCentre (2016-21). Among her publications are the books Gender Research (2015), Why There Are Great Women Artists in Ukrainian Art (2019), special issue Euphoria and Fatigue: Ukrainian Art and Society after 2014 (co-authored with Tatiana Kochubinska, 2019) and Curatorial Handbook (co-authored with Oleksandra Pogrebniak and Dmytro Chepurnyi, 2020). She is also a co-curator of the Secondary Archive project. Her current research touches upon the role of art and culture during political transformation and war. She is a Visiting Fellow at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

Uilleam Blacker

(School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL)
Uilleam Blacker is Associate Professor of Comparative East European Literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. He is the author of Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe: The Ghosts of Others (Routledge, 2019) and a co-author of Remembering Katyn (Polity, 2012). He is also a co-editor of Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). His translations of Ukrainian writers have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Words Without Borders, The London Review of Books, among others.

Ecocide & Urbicide

Darya Tsymbalyuk

(Institute for Human Sciences)
Darya Tsymbalyuk researches, writes, and draws. She is a Visiting Fellow at IWM (Institute for Human Sciences), Vienna, and received her PhD from University of St Andrews, Scotland in 2021. Her work lies at the intersection of environmental, decolonial, and feminist methodologies, as well as artistic research. You can find out more about her here: daryatsymbalyuk.com.

Khaled Malas

(NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts)
Khaled Malas is an architect and art historian from Damascus currently based in New York City. His research focuses on the role of images and image-making technologies in producing and challenging the potential of places, real and imagined. At NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, he is writing a dissertation on medieval magico-medicinal bowls that bear a depiction of the Kaaba. He is the principal of Sigil, an art/design collective exploring the metamorphoses of Arab landscapes marked by historical and contemporary struggles. He teaches at The Cooper Union and at NYU. His most recent work, “Concerning the Observation of Other Corpses”, was published in JSAH 80.04 (2021). A recent interview on his creative practice was included in Art Papers 45.03 (2022).

Maksym Rokmaniko

(Center for Spatial Technologies)
Maksym Rokmaniko (b.1991, Khmelnytsky, UA) is an architect, researcher, and educator. Maksym is the founding director of the Center for Spatial Technologies (CST), the multidisciplinary practice based in Kyiv. Before starting CST, Maksym studied architecture in Kyiv, received a Fulbright to do a Master's in Architecture at the University of Oregon (USA), and worked as an architect in Japan and Netherlands. Maksym is a visiting lecturer at multiple international institutions, such as the Architectural Association in London and the Royal College of Art in London. Maksym is an important researcher, committed to working within the Ukrainian context while establishing important connections and dialogue with major international cultural and educational institutions to bring a cutting-edge, multifaceted, and well-informed critical perspective.

Haris Piplas

Dr. Haris Piplas is author and collaborator of several urban, landscape and architectural projects in Europe, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America and other regions. He is co-author of the book "Global Urban Toolbox". Dr. Piplas was the editor-in-chief of two issues of the Journal of the European Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA), entitled "Adaptive Capacity of Cities". He figured as pavilion curator of the 15th Architecture Biennale in Venice. He is the former Young Leader Chairman of the Urban Land Institute Switzerland, nominator of the Aga Khan Prize for Architecture, New European Bauhaus Award Jury etc. He figured as an expert adviser and consultant for various international organizations such as IPBES, and UN-Habitat. He is part of the Advisory Board of the Kyiv-based CANactions School of Urban Studies. In the international ´Integrated Urban Solutions´ innovation sector of Drees&Sommer, one of the leading planning, engineering and consultancy offices, he was engaged on projects such as the evidence-based climate adaptation strategy for Mannheim, Smart City and Urban Innovation Strategy for Jakarta, Basel Green Capital Strategy, Participatory Smart District, among others. He is the initiator of the Reactivate Sarajevo Urban Transformation Project.

Gerald Torres

(Yale School of the Environment; Yale School of Law)
Gerald Torres is a Professor of Environmental Justice at the Yale School of the Environment and a Professor at the Yale Law School. He is former President of the Association of American Law Schools and has taught at Stanford Law School and at Harvard Law School, where he served as the Oneida Nation Visiting Professor of Law. Professor Torres served as Counsel to the Attorney General on environmental matters and Indian affairs at the U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Torres has served on the board of the Environmental Law Institute, the EPA's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, and the National Petroleum Council. He is board chair of EarthDay.org and founding Chairman of the Advancement Project, a leading Civil Rights advocacy organization. He is a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Professor Torres is on the Advisory Council of The Connecticut Sea Grant. He has served as a consultant to the United Nations on environmental matters and is a life member of the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Displacement & Shelter

Natalia Otrishchenko

(Center for Urban History, Lviv )
Natalia Otrishchenko is a research fellow at the Center for Urban History in Lviv and an associated researcher at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam. She holds a PhD in Sociology (2015, Institute of Sociology, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine). Since March 2022, Natalia has led the Ukrainian team within the “24/02/22, 5 am” international documentation initiative. This Fall, she will be a Fulbright visiting scholar at Columbia University. Natalia is interested in the methods of sociological research, oral history, urban sociology, spatial and social transformations after state socialism.

Anastasiya Ponomaryova

(MetaLab, Kyiv)
An architect, researcher, co-founder of NGO Urban Curators and СO-HATY initiative. She is interested in bottom-up approaches for city revitalization, temporary interventions, and artistic aspects of urban practices. Since 2015 she worked in the Eastern part of Ukraine, enhancing local communities to work with the urban landscape. Her current project focuses on integrated, sustainable, and rapid housing for IDPs in Ukraine.

Dima Srouji

(City Design Studio at Royal College of Art; Hollow Forms Studio)
Dima Srouji founder of Hollow Forms Studio is an architect and visual artist exploring the ground as a deep space of rich cultural weight. Srouji looks for potential ruptures in the ground where imaginary liberation is possible. She works with glass, text, archives, maps, plaster casts, and film, understanding each as an evocative object and emotional companion that help her question what cultural heritage and public space mean in the context of the Middle East. Her projects are developed closely with archaeologists, anthropologists, sound designers, and glassblowers. Srouji is currently the Jameel Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum and leading the MA City Design studio at the Royal College of Art in London.

Dasha Pyrogova

Dasha Pyrogova is an independent research consultant, facilitator and mentor in strategic and tactical urban and social projects, as well as in education programs with GIZ Ukraine and NGO Insha Osvita. Before February, 24 she performed the role of national mentor for elaborating integrated urban development strategies for the city of Melitopol and neighbourhood in Kharkiv. Currently she is a part of ReStart Ukraine project which intends to develop reconstruction strategy for Ukraine and focuses on onwar and postwar recovery for critical social infrastructure and forced migration and comeback. Master of Social Science, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (2011).

Sasha Topolnytska

(Architect and designer, Kyiv/NYC)
Sasha Topolnytska is a Ukrainian-born designer, educator and entrepreneur based in Brooklyn, NY. She has experience working on multiple scales and typologies from design of objects and toys, installations and interiors, to design and realization of architectural and public space projects. Sasha is currently working on initiatives in support of Ukraine in NYC and back home.
Sasha Topolnytska and Lindsay Harkema are currently working together on a Дія-Ти / Diya-Ty, an initiative to create design workshops for Ukrainian youth to empower them with skills to rebuild in the future. The project is supported by the New York State Council of the Arts. Other ongoing collaborative projects includes a multi-year research initiative with WIP Collaborative and Verona Carpenter Architects about design for neurodiversity in the public realm, which was the winner of the 2021 Design Trust for Public Space’s RFP entitled “The Restorative City”.

Lindsay Harkema

(WIP Studio, New York)
Lindsay Harkema (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based architect and educator, founder of WIP: Work in Progress | Women In Practice and a founding member of WIP Collaborative, a shared feminist design practice focused on projects that engage communities and the public realm. She teaches at the City College of New York and Barnard College.
Lindsay and Sasha Topolnytska are currently working together on a Дія-Ти/ Diya-Ty, an initiative to create design workshops for Ukrainian youth to empower them with skills to rebuild in the future. The project is supported by the New York State Council of the Arts. Other ongoing collaborative projects includes a multi-year research initiative with WIP Collaborative and Verona Carpenter Architects about design for neurodiversity in the public realm, which was the winner of the 2021 Design Trust for Public Space’s RFP entitled “The Restorative City”.

Heritage: Destruction, Salvage & Legacy

Iryna Matsevko

(Kharkiv School of Architecture)
A historian, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the Kharkiv School of Architecture, Ukraine, that was evacuated from Kharkiv to Lviv in March 2022. As a Humanities Block tutor, she designs courses on the cultural and social contexts of architecture, heritage studies and urban practices. Her academic interests include social and cultural history of Soviet Ukraine, urban history, urban heritage and practices as a driver of sustainability of cities and communities. Till 2019, she was Deputy Director and Head of the Public History Programs at the Centre for Urban History, Lviv, Ukraine, managing public history projects on contested memories and inclusive approaches in heritage practices.

Iryna Sklokina

(Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, Lviv)
Iryna Sklokina is a research fellow at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv, Ukraine. She defended her Candidate of Sciences dissertation in 2014 (“Official Soviet Politics of Memory of Nazi Occupation, Case of Kharkiv, 1943–1985”). Her recent book (coedited with Volodymyr Kulikov and coauthored) is Pratsia, vysnazhennia ta uspikh: promyslovi monomista Donbasu (Labor, Exhaustion, and Success: Company Towns of the Donbas [Lviv, 2018]). She also co-edited and co-authored a special issue of Region journal ("Donbas Imaginaries: Heritage, Culture, Communities", together with Victoria Donovan) and volume "The Political Cult of the Dead in Ukraine: Traditions and Dimensions from the First World War to Today" (together with Guido Hausmann). Iryna’s scholarly interests include (post)Soviet politics of memory, museum studies, and Soviet and industrial heritage. She coordinated and cooperated in research and public history projects: the GCRF-funded “De-Industrialization and Conflict in Donbas” (2019), and the House of Europe-funded “(Un)archiving (Post)industry” (2020–21). She is currently engaged in the “Open Heritage” international project focused on adaptive heritage reuse (Horizon 2020) and international research project "Social Politics in European Borderlands. A Comparative and Transnational Study, 1870s-1990s (SOCIOBORD)".

Kateryna Kublytska

Kateryna Kublytska is a practicing architect and restorer, laureate of the State Prize of Ukraine in Architecture (2011). Graduated from Kharkiv National University of Civil Engineering and Architecture.

Polina Baitsym

(CEU Budapest/Vienna)
Polina Baitsym is an art historian and curator specialising in socialist realism in the Ukrainian visual arts. She is currently a doctoral candidate in comparative history at Central European University, Budapest/Vienna, and a curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art NGO (MOCA) Library, Kyiv, Ukraine.

Yulia Frolova

bio coming soon

Edward Denison

Edward Denison is Professor of Architecture and Global Modernities at The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), where he is Director of the MA Architecture and Historic Urban Environments. His research is motivated by historiographical inequity and sustainability. He has published over 20 books and in 2016 and 2017, won the RIBA President’s Medal for Research for his work on the successful UNESCO World Heritage Nomination of the modernist city of Asmara (Eritrea), and for his work on Ultra-Modernism in Manchuria, respectively. In 2020, he cofounded the global collaborative, MoHoA (Modern Heritage of Africa / Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene), which is hosting a conference at UCL from 26-28 Oct.

Infrastructures & Superstructures

Sophie Lambroschini

(Centre Marc Bloch)
Dr. Sophie Lambroschini is a researcher in contemporary socio-economic history of Central/Eastern Europe at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. She investigates how industries, critical infrastructure services and ordinary people adapt to geopolitical tension and conflict. After defending a doctoral dissertation on Soviet international bankers in the Cold war (U.Nanterre 2018), she turned to Ukraine where she lived (2005-15) to document cross-frontline water supply in Donbas since 2014. At the Centre Marc Bloch she directs the project LimSpaces - Living with Uncertainty. Strategies of Adaptation and Horizons of Expectations in Ukraine and Moldova – in collaboration with ZOiS and CNRS-Géographie-Cités. Her book Ukrainiens was published in a revised edition in June 2022 (Editions Ateliers Henry Dougier).

Svitlana Matviyenko

(School of Communication of Simon Fraser University, Vancouver)
Svitlana Matviyenko is Assistant Professor of Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication. Her research and teaching are focused on information and cyberwar; political economy of information; media and environment; infrastructure studies; STS. She writes about practices of resistance and mobilization; digital militarism, dis- and misinformation; Internet history; cybernetics; psychoanalysis; posthumanism; the Soviet and the post-Soviet techno-politics; nuclear cultures, including the Chernobyl Zone of Exclusion. She is a co-editor of two collections, The Imaginary App (MIT Press, 2014) and Lacan and the Posthuman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is a co-author of Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism (Minnesota UP, 2019), a winner of the 2019 book award of the Science Technology and Art in International Relations (STAIR) section of the International Studies Association and of the Canadian Communication Association 2020 Gertrude J. Robinson book prize.

Asia Bazdyrieva

An art historian whose research interests span across visual culture, (feminist) epistemology, and environmental humanities at large, and pay particular attention to the project of Soviet modernity with its ideological and material implications in spaces, bodies, and lands. She holds master's degrees in art history from the City University of New York and analytical chemistry from the Kyiv National University

Mykola Kostrytsia

PhD in Economics, Director of Economic Development Department Zhytomyr City Council (2016-2021), co-founder NGO “Zhytomyr Volunteer Headquarters”. Under his leadership, more than 15 projects were developed over 85 mln. Euro international technical and financial assistance (GIZ, SECO, KFW, Covenant of Mayors, etc.), the Integrated Urban Development Concept for Zhytomyr 2030 and sectoral strategic documents (Sustainable Energy Action Plan, Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan, Local Economic Development Plan, etc.) were developed, the municipal energy management system was built and certified (European Energy Award).

Kate Brown

(Netherland Institute for Advanced Studies)
Kate Brown’s research interests illuminate the point where history, science, technology and bio-politics converge to create large-scale disasters and modernist wastelands. She has written four books about topics ranging from population politics, linguistic mapping, the production of nuclear weapons and concomitant utopian communities, the health and environmental consequences of nuclear fallout from the Chernobyl disaster to narrative innovations of history writing in the 21st century. She is currently exploring the history of what she calls “plant people:” indigenes, peasants and maverick scientists who understood long before others that plants communicate, have sensory capacities, and possess the capacity for memory and intelligence. She teaches environmental history, Cold War history, and creative non-fiction history writing. Brown has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the European University Institute, The Kennan Institute, Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the U.S. Holocaust Museum. The National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the International Research and Exchanges Board and the Social Science Research Foundation have supported Brown’s research. Brown is a consulting editor for the American Historical Review (AHR) and co-founder of its special section called “History Unclassified.” She serves as a senior editor of International Labor and Working Class History (ILWCH).

Mariana Svirchuk

( 10 September 2022 )

Bordering a Space - Time for Trauma, Grief, and Mourning

Oleh Berezyuk

Member of Ukrainian Union of Psychotherapists, supervisor and coach. Assistant professor, Department of psychiatry and psychotherapy , Lviv National Medical University. Member of the Parliament of Ukraine, VIII convocation 2014-2019, Head of parliamentary political group “Samopomich”

Beatrice Patsalides Hofmann

(Primo Levi Center, Paris)
Clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. Staff psychologist at the Primo Levi Center/Paris (since 2005), private psychoanalytic practice. Member and training analyst Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis, Berkeley, CA. Former Clinical Director of Survivors International, SF, USA, center for the treatment of victims of political violence. Co-author of the UN-sponsored Istanbul Protocol. Numerous publications in psychoanalysis and analytic practice in the field of political violence and torture, including women’s health and gender-based violence.

Steven Marans

(Yale School of Medicine)
Steven Marans, PhD is a child and adult psychoanalyst, is the Harris Professor of Child Psychoanalysis and Professor of Psychiatry, at the Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Marans is the co-director of the Yale Center for Traumatic Stress and Recovery at the Yale Child Study Center. He the co-developer of the Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention (CFTSI), the only evidence-based, developmental/dynamically-informed brief early intervention for children and families impacted by recent traumatic events, now being implemented nationally and internationally. Dr. Marans has worked extensively with children, families and communities in the aftermath of violence, sexual abuse, medical emergencies, mass casualty and other catastrophic events.

Orest Vasylyk

Orest Vasylyk is a visual artist, psychologist, and psychodynamic psychotherapist residing in Lviv, Ukraine. With experience in clinical practice individual and group psychotherapy and in art theory, Vasylyk currently practices at the Mental Health Center of the Lviv Hospital of St. Panteleimon. He is currently a candidate as psychotherapist from the Lviv Psychoanalytic Institute for Mental Health and holds a Masters of Psychology from the Lviv State University of Life Safety and a Bachelor of Applied Arts from the Ivan Trush Lviv State College of Decorative and Applied Arts

War and the Arts of Witness

Nikita Kadan

Nikita Kadan is an artist based in Kyiv. Nikita Kadan works with painting, graphics, and installation, often in interdisciplinary collaboration with architects, sociologists and human rights activists. He is a member of the artist group REP (Revolutionary Experimental Space) and founding member of Hudrada (Artistic Committee), a curatorial and activist collective.

Mykola Ridnyi

Mykola Ridnyi (born in Kharkiv, lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine) is an artist, filmmaker, and curator. He graduated from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Art. Ridnyi is a founding member of the artist collective SOSka group. He works across media ranging from site-specific installations and sculpture to photography and experimental films. His works have been shown in exhibitions and film festivals including Transmediale at HKW in Berlin (2019), 35th Kassel documentary film festival (2018), The Image of War at Bonniers konsthall in Stockholm (2017), All the World’s Futures at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), The School of Kyiv - Kyiv Biennale (2015), and other venues.

Alevtina Kakhidze

Alevtina Kakhidze is a Ukrainian artist. She works predominantly with performance and drawing. Based in Muzychi, Ukraine, 26 kilometers from Kyiv and having grown up in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, Kakhidze has experienced Ukraine’s abrupt and chaotic changes from the days of the USSR to the imbalanced environment after, including undeclared war between Russia and Ukraine in 2014 and the recent brutal attack that started on the 24th of February 2022. Kakhidze’s work is now interested in plants. To her, they are still an example for us to follow — she views plants as one of the best examples of pacifism on our planet. Her beliefs against the production of weapons – and its fundamental impact on society – are central to her practice. She is currently researching the possibilities of breaking this chain of producing weapons in general, while taking into account the existence, and need, for defensive/liberation wars as she is witnessing in her home country.

Oleksiy Radynski

(Visual Culture Research Center)
Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker and writer based in Kyiv. His 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, and have received a number of festival awards. 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.

Laura Wexler

(Yale University)
Laura Wexler studies the photographic enhancement of regimes of race, gender, sexuality, class and region in U.S. culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. She is the Charles H. Farnam Professor of American Studies, and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Yale University, and Acting Co-Chair of the Public Humanities Program, where she also directs the Photographic Memory Workshop. Along with many essays, chapters, presentations, curated exhibitions and reviews, her work on photography includes Tender Violence:Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism; Pregnant Pictures, with photographer Sandra Matthews, and Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, with Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas and Leigh Raiford (forthcoming).

Marianne Hirsch

(Columbia University)
Marianne Hirsch writes about the transmission of memories of violence across generations, combining feminist theory with memory studies in global perspective. Her recent books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012), Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010) and School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference (2020), both co-authored with Leo Spitzer, and the co-edited volumes Women Mobilizing Memory (2019). Hirsch is professor emerita of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University.

Iryna Tsilyk

IRYNA TSILYK (born 1982 in Kyiv) is Ukrainian filmmaker and writer. The director of the award-winning documentary film The Earth Is Blue As an Orange which has won the “Directing Award” at Sundance Film Festival 2020, as well as numerous other honors. The new Tsilyk’s feature-length fiction film Rock. Paper. Grenade based on the novel of Ukrainian prose writer and Iryna’s husband Artem Chekh will be premiered this fall. Moreover, Iryna Tsilyk is the author of Depth of Field (collection of poems, 2016), Red Marks on Black (short story collection, 2015), Such an interesting life (children’s book, 2015), The City-tale of One’s Friendship (children’s adventure novel, 2016), Birthmarks (short story collection, 2013), The Day After Yesterday (novel, 2008), Qi (collection of poems, 2007). Some of her poems and short stories have been translated into English, German, French, Polish, Lithuanian, Czech, Swedish, Romanian, Catalan, Greek, Italian. They have been presented at several international literary festivals and events including Ledbury Poetry Festival, Poesiefestival Berlin, Vilenica International Literary Festival, book fairs in Prague, Vienna, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Vilnius and others. During the years of Russian-Ukrainian war, Iryna has taken part in many literary readings, documentary shootings, tutoring for children etc. in the war zone. Her recent poetry and films reflect this experience.

The Past in Progress: Employing & Decentring

Sofia Dyak

(Center for Urban History, Lviv)
Dr. Sofia Dyak is a director of the Center for Urban History (Ukraine), an institution focusing on research, digital and public history, and educational programs. Her research interests include post-war history of border cities, heritage and urban planning in socialist cities and their legacies. Another area of her work is public history, including curating exhibitions and spatial commemorative projects in urban context. Dr. Dyak was a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Historical Dialogue and Accountability Program at Columbia University and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Currently she is also a senior research fellow at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam.

Mayhill Fowler

(Department of History, Stetson University)
Dr. Mayhill C. Fowler (Ph.D., Princeton) is an associate professor in the Department of History at Stetson University. She has published widely on culture in Ukraine, including her book BeauMonde on Empire's Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine (Toronto, 2017). She has held fellowships at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, the University of Toronto, and was a Fulbright scholar to Ukraine 2019-2020. She is an affiliated researcher with the Center for Urban History in Lviv, affiliated faculty in the Program in Theater Studies at Ivan Franko National University, and a member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society NYC.

Kimberley St.Julian Varnon

(Department of History, University of Pennsylvania)
Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her Master's degree in Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian Studies from Harvard University. Kimberly's work examines how the presence of people of color shaped ideas and understandings of race, ethnicity, and nationality policy in the Soviet Union, East Germany, and contemporary Ukraine and Russia. Her public writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, the Moscow Times, and the Kennan Institute's Russia File. She has also become a regular commentator on Ukraine and Russia in American and international media outlets such as the BBC, CBC, CNN, MSNBC, and NBC.

Michał Murawski

(School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London)
Michał Murawski is an anthropologist of architecture and cities. He is Associate Professor of Critical Area Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His first book, The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw and a City Transfixed was published by Indiana University Press in 2019; and he is currently working on completing his second book, a critical study of politics and architecture in post-Soviet Russia. He is Director of the UCL SSEES FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity; and convenor of PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics in the Global East), a seminar and events platform based at UCL.

Yulia Yurchuk

(Department of History, Södertörn University)
I am a historian with the main focus on history of Ukraine and Eastern Europe in 20th century. In 2015 i got PhD in history from Stockholm University and Södertörn University. My dissertation “Reordering of Reordering of Meaningful Worlds: Memory of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Post-Soviet Ukraine” focuses on the the use of history. I studied in Rivne (Ukraine), Göttingen (Germany) and Deusto (Spain) for Master degrees. Currently I am working as a researcher at Södertörn University in the projects "Information management in Russian-Ukrainian conflict" and "Religion and Politics in Ukraine: The Influence of Churches and Religious Traditions in Formation of Collective Memory" funded by the Baltic Sea Foundation. My main field of interest includes memory politics in East European countries, history of the Second World War, history of churches and religion, nationalism, state- and nation-building, gender studies and womens history, postcolonial studies.

Art Practice and War: Thinking About the Institution of Art and Education Through International Mutualism

Vasyl Cherepanyn

(Visual Culture Research Center)
Vasyl Cherepanyn is Head of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC), an institution he cofounded in Kyiv in 2008 as a platform for collaboration among academic, artistic, and activist communities. He holds a PhD in philosophy (aesthetics) and has lectured at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), University of Helsinki, Free University of Berlin, Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, University of Vienna,Institute for Advanced Studies of the Political Critique in Warsaw, and University of Greifswald. He 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), Hybrid Peace (Stroom, The Hague, 2019), and Armed Democracy (2nd edition of Biennale Warszawa, 2022), among others. VCRC is the organizer of the Kyiv Biennial (The School of Kyiv, 2015; The Kyiv International, 2017; The Kyiv International—’68 NOW, 2018; Black Cloud, 2019; Allied, 2021) and a founding member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance. VCRC received the European Cultural Foundation Princess Margriet Award for Culture in 2015 and the Igor Zabel Award Grant for Culture and Theory in 2018.

Olya Zhuk

Olga Zhuk is curator from Kyiv, Ukraine. Since autumn 2021 she works as a deputy director on contemporary art and museum affairs at the National art, culture and museum complex "Mystetskyi Arsenal". In 2017-2021 she was creative director of Dovzhenko Centre, working with the team on development of the institution into modern film museum and national film archive. Among her older curatorial projects the most notable was the International Arsenal Book Festival (2010–2016), which is a landmark interdisciplinary literature and arts event in Ukraine. Besides that in 2016 she was chief of the new department of cultural diplomacy at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, where she developed new policies and recommendations on presentation of Ukrainian culture abroad, modernized the national stand of Ukraine at Frankfurt Book Fair, and took part in writing of the founding documents for establishment of Ukrainian Institute. She graduated with M.A. in cultural studies from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.

Keller Easterling

Keller Easterling is a designer, writer and professor at Yale. Her books include, Medium Design (Verso 2021), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), Subtraction (Sternberg, 2014), Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999).

Marta Kuzma

(Yale School of Art)
Marta Kuzma is a tenured Professor of Art in Critical Practice at the Yale School of Art, where she had served as the first woman to be appointed Dean from 2016 through 2021. Previous to her tenure as Dean at Yale School of Art, Professor Kuzma had served as the Chancellor of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in Sweden, the Director of the Office of Contemporary Art in Oslo in Norway, and the founding Director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv from 1990 – 2000. Earlier in her career she directed the international exhibitions department under Cornell Capa at the International Center of Photography. In addition to serving as a tenured Professor of Art at the Yale School of Art, Kuzma is a visiting Professor in Art Theory in the Graduate Program of Visual Arts in the University of Architecture (IUAV) in Venice, Italy and at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. She holds a post graduate degree in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy in London and an undergraduate degree from Barnard College in NYC.

Peter Osborne

(Kingston University, London)
Peter Osborne is a professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University London. His books include The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (1995; 2011), Philosophy in Cultural Theory (2000), Conceptual Art (2002), Marx (2005), Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (2013) and The Postconceptual Condition (2018). He has contributed to a wide range of international art journals and exhibition catalogues. From 1983 to 2016 he was an editor of the British journal Radical Philosophy. In October 2021 he was a speaker at the conference of the Kyiv Biennial. His new book, Crisis as Form, is forthcoming in September 2022.

( 11 September 2022 )

Masterplanning & Microplanning

Oleksandr Anisimov

Oleksandr Anisimov is an urban planning researcher, MSc in Urban Studies (Universität Wien, Vrije Universiteit Brussel), BSc in Political science (Kyiv-Mohyla Academy). He had experience as a head of an urban research NGO "Understanding Soviet Podil" dealing with issues of urban history, soviet architecture and local identity. He is an initiator and author of a project and a published compendium "After Socialist Modernism". His primary interests concern urban governance, intersections of land and housing policies, and metropolitan planning.

Christina Crawford

(Emory University)
An architectural and urban historian, a trained architect, and associate professor of architectural history at Emory University whose research focuses on the transnational exchange of ideas about housing and urban form in the twentieth century. She is the author of Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union (Cornell University Press, 2022), which features 1920s Kharkiv as a primary site of inquiry, and co-editor of Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917-1945 (MIT Press, 2023). Christina’s new research explores interwar exchanges of housing expertise between the US and Europe, using Atlanta as a primary node. Her research and publications have been supported the American Council of Learned Societies, the Getty Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and the College Art Association, among other institutions. She serves on the board of the Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture.

Iryna Miroshnykova

(FORMA architects)
Iryna Miroshnykova is an architect and urban development researcher. She is currently working on her PhD thesis exploring the socio-economic and planning features of Ukrainian monofunctional cities at Vienna Technical University’s Faculty of Architecture and Spatial Planning. Iryna is a partner at ФОРМА, one of Kyiv’s leading architectural office whose open-minded work is focused on spatial development strategies, masterplanning, renovation programs, as well as interface, installation, exhibition design. Further to this, Iryna has co-founded the Pavilion of Culture, a cross-disciplinary institution, where she curates architectural research.

Oleksandr Shevchenko

(Re-Start Ukraine)
Alexander Shevchenko is an urbanist, and a founder of ReStart Ukraine project and of Zvidsy Agency. Combining engineering, spatial planning, and urban studies from academia Alexander synthesized these within the Zvidsy Agency before the war started and in ReStart Ukraine afterward. Operating with limited resources in the style of acupuncture for the cities and municipalities is the approach Alexander widely suggested working across Ukraine. Nowadays, within ReStart Ukraine, Alexander seeks effective constellations in urban planning, quick response after the war, and strategic modeling later on.

Alan Plattus

(Yale University School of Architecture)
Alan J. Plattus is a Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Yale University School of Architecture, where he teaches courses on architectural history and theory, urban history, and design and directs the School’s Gothenburg Summer Program. He founded and co-directs the Yale Urban Design Workshop, a community design center that has undertaken award-winning urban design and building projects throughout New England and around the world, including a cross-border Peace Park along the Jordan River and post-industrial waterfront development and coastal adaptation in Bridgeport, Connecticut and Gothenburg, Sweden. He has lectured and published widely on the history of cities and civic pageantry, as well as on modern architecture, urbanism, and theory.

Restitutions: appropriation, expropriation, regulation

Joanna Kusiak

bio coming soon

Oleksandr Kravchuk

(Spilne/Commons Journal)
Oleksandr Kravchuk holds a Ph.D. in Economics. He is co-editor of Spilne/Commons Journal and is currently continuing his academic work within the fellowship at Institute for Human Sciences Vienna (IWM). His research interests include neoliberalism and alternative economic policies, political economy, and globalization. Oleksandr is devoted to engaged and public research, which contributes to public discussion and policies, trying to give the perspective of alternative and emancipatory ways of socio-economic development. Since the beginning of the war, he has resided in Kyiv.

Simon Johnson

(MIT Sloan School of Management)
Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He co-founded and currently leads the popular Global Entrepreneurship Lab (GLAB) course – over the past 20 years. MBA students in GLAB have worked on more than 500 projects with start-up companies around the world. He is the coauthor, with Jon Gruber, of Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream. Recently, he has been appointed to the Board of Directors of Fannie Mae (OTCQB) with Sheila Bair, Chairwoman of the Board. Johnson has been a member of the private sector Systemic Risk Council since it was founded by Sheila Bair in 2012; this group is now chaired by Sir Paul Tucker. From April 2009 to April 2015, he was a member of the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers. In March 2016, Johnson was the third distinguished visiting fellow at the Central Bank of Barbados. From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, Johnson was the International Monetary Fund's Economic Counsellor (chief economist) and Director of its Research Department. Johnson holds a BA in economics and politics from the University of Oxford, an MA in economics from the University of Manchester, and a PhD in economics from MIT.

Vladyslav Rashkovan

(International Monetary Fund)
Since February 2017 Vladyslav is a member of the International Monetary Fund Executive Board. As an Alternate Executive Director Vladyslav represents 16 European countries, including Ukraine. Prior to the IMF Vladyslav pursued a prominent banking career, serving as a Deputy Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU), and being responsible for the banking sector reforms. Before joining the Central Bank in 2014, Vladyslav occupied a position of the Chief financial officer of UniCredit Ukraine, also being engaged in leadership of the Group turnaround projects in Central and Eastern Europe. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Vladyslav stands in the center of many international projects to provide financial support to Ukraine and plan the post-war reconstruction. He also serves as a member of the International advisory panel for the National recovery council.

Denise Ferreira da Silva

(University of British Columbia)
Denise Ferreira da Silva is an academic and practicing artist. She is currently Professor of the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), A Dívida Impagavel (2019) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (2013). Her several articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event, The Black Scholar, to name a few. Her artistic works includes the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum (2020), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri.

Reconciliation & Retribution

Philippe Sands

(University College London)
Philippe Sands QC is Professor of Law at University College London and Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard. He is a practising barrister at Matrix Chambers, appears frequently as counsel before the International Court of Justice and other international courts and tribunals, and sits as an international arbitrator. He is a Member of the Board of Hay Festival of Arts and Literature and President of English PEN. His latest books are East West Street: On the Origins of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide (2016) and The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive (2020).

Kateryna Busol

Kateryna Busol is a Ukrainian lawyer specialising in international humanitarian, criminal law, transitional justice, gender and cultural heritage. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine, a fellow of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Germany, and an Academy Associate at Chatham House, the UK.
Kateryna has worked on different issues of accountability and transitional justice related to the Russia-Ukraine armed conflict with UN Women, Global Survivors Fund, Global Rights Compliance as well as Ukrainian NGOs such as the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, Media Initiative for Human Rights and Truth Hounds. She has also been a Visiting Professional at the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Kateryna is the founder of the #InternationalLawTalks and a Board member of the Cambridge Society of Ukraine, which enhances educational opportunities for Ukrainian children.

Ganna Yudkivska

Ganna Yudkivska is a Ukrainian judge born in Kyiv. She is currently the judge of the European Court of Human Rights in respect of Ukraine. Dr Ganna Yudkivska graduated from the Law Faculties of the Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University (Ukraine) and Université Strasbourg III (France). She has her PhD diploma from the Academy of Advocacy of Ukraine. Ganna Yudkivska was a defense attorney and member of the Bar; she served an expert for different human rights organizations; she also leaded in Ukraine and Moldova the legacy project on genocide studies (now – Shoah Institute of the University of South California), Further, she worked as a lawyer at the Registry of the ECtHR and advisor to the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe. In 2010 Ganna Yudkivska was elected a judge of the European Court of Human Rights; in 2015–2016 she was Vice-President of Section V of the Court, as of 2017 she is President of Section IV of the Court. Judge Yudkivska is also an Associate Professor of European and International law at the Academy of Advocacy of Ukraine. She lectured and researched at universities of USA, France, the Netherlands, Israel and Ukraine. She authored a number of scientific articles on human rights, international law and criminal procedure. Yudkivska is a Member of the Executive Board of the European Society of International Law and of the Executive Board of the Ukrainian Association of International Law.

Nathaniel Raymond

Nathaniel Raymond is an American human rights investigator, specializing in the investigation of war crimes including mass killings and torture. Raymond directed the anti-torture campaign at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), and the utilization of satellite surveillance by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI). Raymond advocates the use of intelligence by human rights groups and other non-governmental organisations.

Francine Hirsch

(University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Francine Hirsch is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches courses on Russian and Soviet history, postwar Europe, and the history of human rights. She received her PhD in History from Princeton University in 1998. Her first book, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Cornell, 2005), received several awards, including the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize of ASEEES. Her second book, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War Two (Oxford, 2020), won four book prizes including the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association. Hirsch has launched a new book project on the long history of Russian-American entanglement.

Ievgeniia Gubkina

(Urban Forms Center)
Jenia Gubkina is an architect, architectural historian and curator. In 2014, she co-founded the NGO Urban Forms Center. Her work specializes in architecture and urban planning of the 20th century in Ukraine, and a multidisciplinary approach to heritage studies. Her first book “Slavutych: Architectural Guide” was published in 2015 and was dedicated to the architecture of the last Soviet city of Slavutych. In 2019, after many years of research, her second book “Soviet Modernism. Brutalism. Post-Modernism. Buildings and Structures in Ukraine 1955–1991” was published. In 2020–2021 Gubkina curated the “Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Architecture”.

Building Initiatives for the Future

Natalia Gozak

(Ecoaction)
Natalia Gozak is Executive Director of Ecoaction, one of the leading environmental non-governmental organizations in Ukraine. Ecoaction focuses on advocacy and public mobilization in the spheres of energy transition and climate change, environmental impacts of agriculture and industry. Natalia has 15-years experience in the environmental civil society movements from local grassroot NGOs to big international organisations - before joining Ecoaction Natalia worked for WWF-Ukraine and UNDP. She holds a M.S. and B.S. in ecology and environmental sciences from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, has expertise in climate change, nature conservation and the work of civil society.

Oleh Drozdov

(Ro3kvit Urban Coalition for Ukraine)
Oleg Drozdov is an architect, urbanist, artist, educator. Since 1997 is the founder and Chief Architect of Drozdov&Partners architectural office. In 2017 became one of the founders of the Kharkiv School of Architecture and its tutor and lecturer. KHSA is the first private and independent architectural school in Ukraine. The curator of exhibition projects on International Biennale in Rotterdam (2005), “Patiology” (2006), Moscow Biennale (2012). Co-author and critic of the GSAPP semester project (2011). Expert of European Commission and EU Mies van der Rohe Award. Co-author of the book «Talks on architecture», that opens the Ukrainian architectural contemporary discourse. In 2022 became a co-founder of Ro3kvit Urban Coalition for Ukraine, that will develop a methodology for rebuilding Ukraine’s infrastructure and cities.

Sergii Rodionov

(Mriia)
Sergii Rodionov is a creative director and co-founder of Mriia, initiative for the future of Ukraine and branding consultancy Sergii Dima. Author of Mariupol City brand and Re: Mariupol, reconstruction manifesto for the city, his hometown. In the past Sergii was an art-director of Setka publishing platform and lead the visual direction of numerous international publications — The Village, Look At Me, Hopes&Fears, Accent.

Anna Kamyshan

(Mriia)
Anna Kamyshan is a multidisciplinary curator and artist working in the fields of architecture, urbanism, and socio-cultural studies. Anna used to be a Director of Conceptual Development at Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv. Following the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war, Anna co-founded Mriia, an initiative that aims to imagine the future of Ukraine in a long-term perspective. Anna is a fellow at the Jencks Foundation for Architecture, The Cosmic House in London and was offered a one-year research Academic Sanctuary Fellowship at Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL.

Anna Kyrii

(Chamber of the National Union of Architects of Ukraine)
An architect and the owner of Anna Kyrii Architectural and Projecting Group” LLC. She is the Deputy Chairwoman of the Architectural Chamber of the National Union of Architects of Ukraine.

Ivan Verbytskyi

(CEDOS, Ukraine)
Ivan Verbytskyi was elected as Cedos director in 2019. His research interests include housing policy, urban transformations, local governance, civic participation and urban mobility. Since 2014, Ivan has worked as an analyst and researcher in Cedos. In 2015-2019, he was an editor and a project manager of Mistosite (online urban media); in 2018-2019, he was a project manager of the Ukrainian Urban Forum. Bachelor of Political Science and Master of Sociology, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.

Yulia Krivich

(Solidarity Center of Culture “Słonecznik”)
Yulia Krivich (Dnipro / Warsaw) - visual artist, curator and activist, working with photography, public space and Postartistic practices. Krivich lives in Warsaw, works at the Academy of Arts in Szczecin in the Photography and Postartistic Activities Studio. Since the full-scale Russian invasion on Ukraine, Yulia has coordinated and co-curate Solidarity Center of Culture “Słonecznik” (Sunflower) in the Museum of Modern Arts in Warsaw.

Maria Gryshchenko

(Center for Urban Studies, Kyiv / Center for Urban History, Lviv)
bio coming soon

Petro Vladimirov

Petro Vladimirov is an architect, artist and curator. Не is a project leader at a real estate consultancy firm Direction, and graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of the Wroclaw University of Science and Technology. After the war began, he co-founded the OKNO initiative, which collects reused windows from Poland and sends them to Ukrainian non-profits working on rebuilding bombed homes. Currently, he is curating an exhibition about institutional rebuilding of Ukraine at the Museum of Warsaw.

Ukraine / 2022