My Story

I was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, a small urban city with an incredible countryside dotted with hundreds of bright yellow sunflowers. My grandparents had a beautiful dacha where we’d spend most of our summers, even after my parents and I moved to the United States. I had no siblings for the majority of my childhood and spent a lot of time with my grandparents. I would go foraging for mushrooms with my grandfather, who would make me little stick figure men out of acorns and toothpicks, we’d pick wild raspberries, hang with the local kids climbing our neighbors’ trees to pick plums and spend summers swimming in lakes and grilling kebabs. The Milky Way was so bright out there that I can still remember falling out of my chair staring up at it while we sat around the fire pit, my aunt playing Beatles covers on the guitar.

After moving to the United States, my brother was born, and we spent most of our lives on the east coast, growing up between North Carolina and Virginia. As a kid, I was super shy and read a lot of adventure books. My parents would take us camping and on trips to Italy and encouraged a sense of curiosity, deep feeling and a constant questioning — my mom, a pianist, and my dad, a scientist.

Throughout my life, I always had a desire to document things even before we had social media, so I picked up a camera in varying forms. First, a video camera to capture our summer in Italy when I was 15 which (devastatingly) was lost in transit during our trip back home. Then, a small point-and-shoot Canon that held hundreds of moments and memories with friends as we navigated high school and college. And then, an iPhone where I began some creative expression through artistic and abstract video edits on the Vine app that garnered some traction before the app itself was shut down — a reminder of how fleeting and insignificant these platforms can be.

Finally, I picked up my first mirrorless camera — a Sony a7iii. Shortly after, my husband and I moved away from the east coast to a ruggedly beautiful place full of wildflowers and mountains and waterfalls just like those in the adventures novels I read as a kid. Colorado’s wild beauty and abundance of nature became my muse, and I began to romanticize life through my camera lens. You know how sometimes, you stand in front of something beautiful and think — oh, the picture never looks as good as the real thing? I like to try and make it look even better.

For me, photography amplifies the joy of travel and exploration. It allows me to share my experiences with others and to tell my story, and hopefully inspire that same sense of awe and wonder that I felt behind my lens.