2026 - Kateryna Iakovlenko
Kateryna Iakovlenko is a Ukrainian writer, curator, and researcher born in Rovenky, Eastern Ukraine, since 2014 under Russian occupation.
Her writing explores how war and violence enter language, images, landscapes, and material objects, and how their traces become forms of memory and testimony. She is the author and editor of several books, including Why There Are Great Women Artists in Ukrainian Art (2019), ...Those Who Have Seen Death(2025) and Donbas as Metaphor (2026). She is currently based in Lviv and researching the visual and material culture of war, with a particular focus on ruins, rubble, fragments, and what they retain or reveal after destruction.
Iakovlenko has worked across literature, contemporary art, and cultural journalism. For the past four years, she served as Editor-in-Chief of Suspilne Kultura, the cultural branch of Ukraine’s public broadcaster, and currently serves as an Associate Editor. As a curator, she has organised exhibitions and public programmes in Ukraine, including projects in places close to the frontline. Her work has been presented internationally through exhibitions, publications, lectures, and research projects.
This residency at the Passa Porta Studio was made possible by a contribution from Flanders to the UNESCO multi-donor fund ‘Response activities in and for Ukraine’.
Photo: Elena Subach