Olha Filonchuk
Visual artist, theater stage, costume,
and puppet designer
I became a theater stage designer 13 years ago after my graduation from The Kyiv Academy of Decorative Arts and Design after 6 years of study in embroidery, costume design, and traditional Ukrainian art.
I worked with different theaters in Ukraine and abroad, and created more than 50 performances as a stage designer. In 2019, I became a co-founder of the independent Baby Theater in Kyiv, an immersive theater for kids 0–5 years old.
After the large-scale russian invasion of Ukraine, I temporarily moved to Germany fleeing the war, and the topics and forms of my work changed. I started to explore the theme of forced migration, issues of national and cultural identity, human-nature relationships and nature as an ancient metaphor, a complicated but very clear system of symbols and senses from the perspective of our times and in political and social context using documentary data and work with oral history, the format of photo collages, documentary art books, and installations.