Ewa Thompson

is an American literary scholar
A former professor of Slavic studies and chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at Rice University (USA). She has taught at Indiana University, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia, and has lectured at Princeton, Witswatersrand (South Africa), Toronto (Canada), and Bremen (Germany). She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Warsaw and her doctoral degree from Vanderbilt University. Author of five books, several dozen scholarly articles, hundreds of media publications and reviews. Her books and articles have been translated into Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Chinese, and other languages. Ewa Thompson’s book “Troubadours of the Empire: Russian Literature and Colonialism” has resonated in Ukraine.

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Yaryna is a visual artist, performer, co-curator, and lecturer. She works across various mediums including performance art, painting, graphics, and installation, exploring the concept of presence through the body and its visual expressions.Having graduated from the Lviv National Academy of Arts, Yaryna was a grant recipient of the Gaude Polonia scholarship program by the Polish Minister of Culture and was shortlisted for the Young Ukrainian Artists Competition MYXi (2015) and the II Youth Biennale of Contemporary Art of Ukraine (2019). Yaryna has showcased her work in solo exhibitions and art projects across Ukraine, Poland, and Spain. She has participated in numerous exhibitions, performance art festivals, and conferences worldwide, spanning countries like Ukraine, Poland, Italy, Norway, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Germany, France, Portugal, Spain, Israel, Japan, Thailand, Canada, and the USA.An active organizer and curator, Yaryna co-organized the School of Performance (2019) as part of the International festival “Days of Art Performance in Lviv”, as well as online residencies like “At the place” and “Performance Archive. Ukraine” (2020). She also shares her expertise as a teacher at the Department of Contemporary Art Practices at the Lviv National Academy of Arts.Yaryna’s recent works have been featured at А231 Federação (Salvador, Brazil), JDMooney Foundation and FLOW / Out of Site Chicago (USA), Ukraine!UNMUTED (Kaunas, Lithuania), and BIFPA’23 (Belfast, Northern Ireland/UK).
Yaryna Shumska
Visual artist, performer, co-curator, and lecturer