Holodomor Genocide through the Eyes of an Artist

Lydia Bodnar-Balahutrak is a Ukrainian American artist born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Ukrainian immigrant parents displaced by World War II. Bodnar-Balahutrak received a Bachelor of Science degree from Kent State University (1973) and a Master of Fine Arts degree from George Washington University (1977). She visited Ukraine for the first time in 1991 on an IREX grant. The artist focuses on the human condition in her work and, to that end, addresses how her Ukrainian and American bicultural background informs that experience. She has exhibited widely, nationally and internationally. Her work is found in numerous public and private collections, including at Oxford University, the Barrett Collection, Dallas, and the Tyler Museum of Art, Tyler, Texas. She resides in Houston, Texas, where she is a studio faculty at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

The Ukrainian Museum in New York showcased Bodnar-Balahutrak’s works in the exhibition Evocations (2013), organized to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Holodomor. The artist also participated in the Museum’s 2015 exhibition The Ukrainian Diaspora: Women Artists, 1908–2015, celebrating the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America. In November 2020, the Museum hosted the virtual exhibition Holodomor: A Remembrance.

She was awarded a 2022-23 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award for a project researching contemporary Ukrainian social/political art and presenting exhibitions of her own issues-oriented art in designated regions in Ukraine. Due to the war, her Fulbright Award was re-assigned to Poland. With the University of the Arts in Poznan as her host institution, she pursued a study of socially and politically informed art created by young artists born in Ukraine now living in Poland. Drawing on her experiences as artist, educator, and Ukrainian-American, she curated an exhibition of work by 8 Ukrainian artists, “The Ties That Bind”.

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