Irina Kostrina

Irina Dmitrievna Kostrina was a Soviet and Russian theatre designer, animation art director and book illustrator. She created the look of the characters in the Soyuzmultfilm puppet films The Wolf and the Calf, The Smallest Gnome, Ischezatel and Karpusha, and for more than six decades designed productions for the puppet theatre in her home city of Nizhny Novgorod.

She was born on 14 March 1938 in Gorky, as Nizhny Novgorod was then called. In 1960 she graduated from the Gorky Art College, and she soon began a working life that would be tied for the rest of her career to the Gorky Puppet Theatre, later the Nizhny Novgorod State Academic Puppet Theatre. She served for many years as its chief artist, and much of her work there was made together with the director Alexander Mishin.

Over her career she designed more than 150 puppet productions in Moscow and in cities across Russia, including theatres in Izhevsk, Saransk and Vladimir and the Moscow Regional Puppet Theatre. Her Nizhny Novgorod productions ranged from Little Red Riding Hood, Doctor Aibolit and Kolobok to The Snow Queen, The Little Humpbacked Horse, Ruslan and Lyudmila and Sadko. In 2009 she and Mishin received the Nizhny Novgorod city prize for their production of The Cat's House.

Kostrina became known to a wider audience through her work as art director at Soyuzmultfilm. She designed episodes two to four of The Smallest Gnome between 1980 and 1983, The Wolf and the Calf in 1984, Ischezatel in 1987, Karpusha in 1988 and Charmant, Charmant! in the early 1990s. The Wolf and the Calf won the Silver Elephant prize at an international children's film festival in India, and together with Ischezatel it later received a silver medal of the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy in Moscow. Her films were also recognised at animation festivals in Yugoslavia, Buenos Aires and Portugal.

She also illustrated many children's books for the Malysh and AST publishing houses, carrying her fairy tale puppet world onto the page. She was a member of the Union of Artists of Russia and the Union of Theatre Workers of the Russian Federation, and was named an Honoured Worker of Culture of the Russian Federation. Her work is held by the Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, the puppet museum of the Obraztsov Puppet Theatre, the Museum of Cinema, Pushkin museums in Saint Petersburg and Boldino, and the Nizhny Novgorod regional museum.

Irina Kostrina died on 26 October 2026 at the age of 88. Her family reported the death to the media, and it was carried by Russian outlets including Moskovsky Komsomolets and News.ru. The cause of death was not made public.