Expert Bio

Svitlana Biedarieva is an art historian, curator, and artist. Her research focus is contemporary Ukrainian art, decoloniality, and Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine. She holds a PhD in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She is the editor of Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021 (2021) and the co-editor of At the Front Line. Ukrainian Art, 2013–2019 (2020). She has published on Ukrainian art in October, ArtMargins Online, post at MoMA, Burlington Contemporary, Financial Times, and The Art Newspaper, among others. In 2022/23, she was selected as the Non-Resident Visiting Fellow at the IERES at the George Washington University and the CEC ArtsLink International Fellow. In 2023/24, she has been a visiting lecturer in decolonization, art, and visual culture at the University of Zurich and the Kyiv School of Economics. Currently, she is working on a monograph Ambicoloniality and War: The Ukrainian-Russian Case (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, forthcoming) and an edited book Art in Ukraine: Identity Construction and Anti-Colonial Resistance (Routledge, 2024, forthcoming). Website: https://svitlanabiedarieva.com/.

Wilson Center Project

Ukraine’s Decolonization and Its Cultural Impact in a Time of War