LANA KOUCHNIR

BIO

Lana Kouchnir is a Ukraine-born, Toronto-based award-winning emerging actor and multidisciplinary artist. She was named a longlisted finalist for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize and was awarded a 2023 Shevchenko Foundation Literary Arts Grant. She has shared her genre-bending theatre and poetry performances for platforms such as the Toronto Summerworks Theatre Festival, the Vancouver Queer Arts Festival, Toronto Pride, the Undercurrents Ottawa Theatre festival, and Guelph University's Speak Easy Series. Her performances and writings center queer Ukrainian folklore and are driven by a transdisciplinary approach to storytelling. Lana graduated from the 2015-2016 Transdisciplinary Arts Residency at the Watah Theatre; she was a recipient of the Watah Theatre's Outstanding Performance Award for her workshop presentation of Vovk, a monodrama created under the mentorship and dramaturgy of d'bi. young anitafrika. She was selected as a 2015-2016 City of Ottawa 'Youth in Culture' Youth Advisory Committee member and her hybrid photo-poetry essay was selected for the 2019 Diaspora Dialogues National Short Form Mentorship Program. Lana was awarded a Canada Council for the Arts grant as part of the CBC Arts Digital Originals initiative to write and produce a short lyrical poem video based on her poem, Odesa Caviar. She completed a virtual 6-month film production mentorship program with Concordia University Television in 2021.