Ukrainian Women in Culture
Learn more about famous Ukrainian female academicians such as Tetyana Holembiyevska, Kira Muratova, Liudmyla Milyaeva and Halyna Neledva.
Tetyana Holembiyevska (1936-2018)
Besides being a talented artist, Tetyana Holembiyevska was a prolific educator and Academician of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine. She used to work in easel painting, and created a series of portraits and still lifes. At first glance, her landscapes are slightly muted and dim, but that is the reason for their real and vital depiction.
The pastel colours add intimacy to the style of the paintings. Owing to the unique sensibility and romantic attitude of the author herself, simple scenes of landscapes evoke beautiful, albeit somewhat sad, memories and lyrical moods among the viewers.
Kira Muratova (1934-2018)"Harmony doesn't mean balance. You must destroy something symmetrically, break the rules. It's only then that things grab you." – Kira MuratovaThe award-winning film director, screenwriter and actress. Kira Muratova’s trenchant, sonically layered, and furiously sensorial cinema spans twenty-one films made over six tumultuous decades, products of her bracingly original cinematic imagination.
Her challenging and radical oeuvre bodies forth through a set of paradoxes. She was one of the most suppressed (and most transgressive) filmmakers of Soviet cinema. Still, she remained in history "a great, fearless filmmaker who poked at open wounds".
Halyna Neledva (1938-2017)
An artist and academic, she represented the country twice at the Venice Biennale in the eighties. Her work affirms the strength of the human spirit, the value of art, and the importance of artistic work. Halyna Neledva declared herself an extraordinary, gifted artist.
Her eyes gazed into life itself with curiosity and surprise, noticing the eternal and timeless in the ordinary and familiar, while ignoring the cruel limits of the so-called "socialist realism”. Her works were defined by heightened emotionality, reverent spirituality, and the author's commitment to unshakable humanistic principles: love, friendship, and mutual understanding.
Liudmyla Milyaeva (1925-2022)
Prominent Ukrainian art critic, an Academic of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine, and the author and co-author of more than two hundred research works. For more than four decades she has been rediscovering the history of Ukrainian fine arts and revealing the treasures of national culture from centuries-old history.
Her art historical research, mainly related to sacred art, courageously defended the "scientific truth, paving the way through the "historical and artistic virgin soil," where even renowned men of science were afraid to step in during those harsh atheistic times.