Daria Alyoshkina

Daria Oleksiivna Alyoshkina was born in Kyiv on 5 March 1982. Her parents, Oleksiy and Lyudmyla Alyoshkin, were both sculptors. The family later moved to the village of Bukatynka in Vinnytsia Oblast, where her parents made sculpture and pottery, painted, and brought up five children, and she spent her childhood there.

She graduated from the Shkribliak College of Applied Arts in Vyzhnytsia in 2001 and from the Lviv National Academy of Arts in 2007, with a master's degree in monumental and decorative sculpture.

Alyoshkina began exhibiting in 1996. She worked in easel and monumental sculpture, paper cutting and graphics, took part in more than 30 sculpture symposiums in Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania, and also directed a shadow theatre called Dyv. Her sculptures stand in towns including Kyiv, Lviv, Chornomorsk, Zhovkva, Kolomyia, Svaliava, Kalush and Gdansk.

After her children were born she turned to vytynanka, the traditional Ukrainian craft of cutting paper decorations for windows, as a way to keep making art alongside family life. She developed a technique for very large panels, folding huge sheets in half and cutting the ornament by hand from an improvised sketch, so that each work opened out into a symmetrical, lace-like design. Over her career she cut hundreds of square metres of paper, and she also experimented with modern materials to make installations and stage sets.

From 2010 she represented Ukraine abroad with these monumental works, which were shown in Poland, Germany, France, South Korea, Canada, the United States, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Denmark and elsewhere. In 2018 Cartier decorated its Kyiv boutique with her paper cuts, and that year she showed at the Revelations biennale of fine craft at the Grand Palais in Paris and dressed the Ukrainian stand at Maison et Objet during Paris Design Week. In 2019 her work was exhibited at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva and she collaborated with the French designer Isabelle Daeron on window displays. She was invited by the Michelangelo Foundation to a Venice craft biennale in 2020, and later exhibitions included Lace of Memory, in memory of the victims of the 1932 to 1933 famine, at Willa Decjusza in Krakow (2020), Shchedryk at the National Museum in Lviv (2021), the Vogue UA Futurespective show in Kyiv (2021), St. Petri church in Hamburg (2022), the Venice architecture biennale and Revelations again in 2023, and Stille Poesie at the Stuttgart city museum in 2024.

Alyoshkina lived and worked in Lviv. She was married to Hordiy Starukh, a Lviv musician, sculptor and maker of the lira, the Ukrainian hurdy-gurdy, and they had three children.

Daria Alyoshkina died suddenly on 15 August 2026, aged 44. Her husband, Hordiy Starukh, announced her death on Facebook that day, writing that his loving wife, the mother of his three children and a world-class artist, had suddenly passed away. The cause of death and the place of death were not made public.

Maksym Kozytskyi, head of the Lviv Regional Military Administration, said that the Lviv region and the whole country had lost an exceptionally talented artist whose vytynanky were known far beyond Ukraine. A memorial service was held on the evening of 17 August at the Church of St. Clement the Pope in Lviv, followed by the funeral there the next morning, and she was buried in Lychakiv Cemetery on 18 August 2026.

Alyoshkina is credited with reviving and popularising vytynanka, a once humble household craft, and with carrying it into galleries, luxury design and public spaces abroad. Her monumental paper lace, every pattern her own and cut by hand, became one of the most recognisable images of contemporary Ukrainian decorative art, and helped audiences in many countries discover Ukrainian folk culture.