Public Talk: Art in Times of War

Join Ukrainian filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk and Princeton University translator in residence Hanna Leliv as they discuss art and artists in wartime.

Iryna Tsilyk is a Ukrainian filmmaker and writer, based in Kyiv. She is the director of the award-winning documentary film The Earth Is Blue As an Orange which won the “Directing Award” at the Sundance Film Festival 2020, as well as numerous other honors. Tsilyk is also known for her fiction film Rock. Paper. Grenade based on the novel Who Are You? by Ukrainian writer, and Iryna’s husband, Artem Chekh.

Iryna Tsilyk is the author of 8 books (poetry, prose, children’s books) published in Ukraine. Many of her poems, short stories and essays have been translated into multiple languages and presented in different international publications, literary festivals and events. Over the years of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Iryna has taken part in different literary readings, documentary shootings, tutoring for children, etc. in the war zone. At the same time, her husband Artem Chekh became a soldier of Armed Forces of Ukraine twice. Iryna’s recent writing and films mostly reflect on different angles of these lived experiences.

Hanna Leliv is a native of Lviv, Ukraine, where she works as a freelance translator and runs literary translation workshops at Ukrainian Catholic University. She was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Iowa’s Literary Translation Workshop and mentee at the Emerging Translators Mentorship Program run by the UK National Center for Writing. Her translations of contemporary Ukrainian literature into English have appeared in Asymptote, BOMB, Washington Square Review, Circumference, and elsewhere. In 2022, Astra House published Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadent and the Depraved of Chornobyl by Markiyan Kamysh in her translation. She most recently served as faculty fellow at the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College.