Lesia Maruschak is an artist and Artist–Bookmaker & Cultural Steward whose work examines memory, displacement, and the transmission of historical trauma, with a particular focus on Ukraine and its diasporas. She works across photography, artist books, film, performance, and archival forms. Her practice centers on testimony, archive, material translation, and the book as a performative object.
Maruschak’s practice engages photography, poetry, performance, and large-scale installations within the landscape, with each format functioning as a distinct register of research and testimony. Books are central to her work and are conceived not as containers, but as active sites where meaning emerges through material encounter. Her work is underpinned by rigorous research into land, histories of colonization, geopolitics, and exile. She has exhibited widely at museums, galleries, and art spaces worldwide. The National Holodomor Genocide Museum, Kyiv, named her mobile memorial Project MARIA the most important exhibition addressing the Soviet Ukraine famine-genocide.
Translation operates throughout her work not as conversion, but as a method for holding what cannot be fully known—materializing absence, fragmentation, and partial recovery.
Her monograph Maria won the Kyiv International Book Festival Grand Prix Award and Experimental Book Award and was shortlisted for the Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles Book Award and the Athens Photography Festival Book Award. Her limited-edition artist books are held in numerous public and institutional collections, including the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; the National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum; the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Maison Européenne de la Photographie; the Boston Athenaeum; the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University; Green Library Special Collections at Stanford University; Rare Books & Special Collections at the Library of Congress; and Butler Library Special Collections at Columbia University.
Maruschak is the founder of the MENEZVUT and VYDNO Collectives. Her work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ukrainian World Congress, the Canada First World War Internment Recognition Endowment Council, and numerous private foundations. She is the recipient of the Governor General’s Silver Medal Award and Caring Canadian Award, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress Saskatchewan National Builder’s Award, and the Ottawa Woman of Inspiration Award. She is currently a Research Affiliate at the University of Saskatchewan’s Prairie Centre for the Study of Ukrainian Heritage.
Lesia Maruschak (b. 1961) lives and works between Ottawa, Ontario, and Alvena, Saskatchewan. She holds an MA from the University of Saskatchewan and an MBA from the University of Ottawa, and completed fine art studies in the United States and Romania.
Selected field notes and process images are shared intermittently via Instagram.
