Tania Khodakivska is a Ukrainian filmmaker based in New York City. Her body of work includes feature films, documentaries, and TV shows. Among her main awards is the Gold Plaque at the Chicago International Film Festival, the Silver Screen at the US International Film and Video Festival, and Ukrainian Film Academy Award. A star list of her latest projects includes Mickey Rourke, Peter Green, Vincent Young, musicians Ice-T, and Onyx, among companies – United Nations Organization, and Netflix.

What sets Tania’s Khodakivska apart as an artist is her ability to combine meaningful themes with exciting story-telling: a remembering of mortality in Enticing, Sugary, Bondless or Songs and Dances about Death, the vulnerability of children during the wars in Angels of War, a resistance to mind-hacking in current project “Paradise Escape.”

As an artist Tetiana Khodakivska is constantly looking for new ways to open the conversation about important questions, creating environments where the Audience can become a part of the Art rather than an observer.  In 2022 she co-curated the Exhibition of Modern Ukrainian Art in the James Gallery of the Cuny Graduate Centers. This exhibition brings the presence of 51 artworks by 40 Ukrainian artists (late 1980s–2022) to New York audiences through projections. Conjuring the artworks as an immersive environment of projections points out the real danger of the erasure and loss of this cultural production because of Russia’s war of aggression. The artworks are simultaneously present and absent highlighting the liminal space between existence and loss during the ongoing war. The physicality of exhibition visitors’ bodies as they walk amidst the space is consequential: the viewers cast shadows as they walk amidst the works, at times fully obscuring the projections or being faced with an alarming glare of the flash of the artwork. As viewers become aware of their own bodily presence and their implication in the narrative of presence loss and resistance of the exhibition, they can make choices about how to move through the labyrinth of pedestals. This exhibition is the largest gathering of contemporary Ukrainian art in the United States in the last twenty years.

Tetiana Khodakivska’s current project is raising awareness of the kidnapping of Ukrainian kids to Russia and changing their names and identities by instruments of Russian Propaganda. However, the question she raises is important far beyond Ukraine: “Is it possible to resist and to learn how to protect your own identity while there are so many instruments to hack it? How should we change our Educational systems to protect ourselves and our kids”

Tania Khodakivska is a member of the European Film Academy, the Ukrainian Film Academy, and the Directors Guild of Ukraine.