Let’s talk a bit about yourself. What’s your background?
I was born in a small, traditional family in Ukraine. When I was two years old, we moved to Russia. As a child, I enjoyed multiple forms of Art. I attended a Russian Ballet school, and additionally, I always enjoyed studying artists and their history in school. Later on, I understood that Art could be an interesting way to convey important moral messages to society.
No one enjoys being told what to do. It’s more comfortable for people to individually perceive these messages through different Art forms to understand and make a choice to create a better world. For example, a dancer performing on a trash hill symbolizes how the Earth can be beautiful, but we are limiting its potential by mindlessly polluting it.
How did your charity journey has begun?
When I became a mother, I gradually began to think about how my next generations will live. At that point, the statistics on the state of the environment were only going down. I wanted to make a change. I understood that if we did not change our behavior to the world around us, then my grandchildren’s future would not be as bright as I would have hoped.
Since I engaged a lot with the Art World, I was invited to participate in a large, international non-profit art project. This was when I started the Open Culture. After doing this for a very long time, I realized that Art could be used to do so much more. I wanted to use it to send positive messages to society to revert the harmful changes that we have made to this world.