Kupchynska Iryna

Iryna Kupchynska is a poet, essayist, performer. She works in the field of social innovations and collective memory. She studied PR at Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University and social anthropology at SOAS of London University.

Since 2017, she has been part of the music and poetry performance Euterpe and interdisciplinary projects in Ukraine, Germany, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Switzerland, Austria. In 2022, she was a fellow of the literary residency Herrenhaus Edenkoben (Germany), where a bilingual German English collection of essays about daily losses of life at war was published. Her essays were published in the media such as NV, LB.ua, Divoche.media, Die Welt. In 2024, Iryna participated in PEN Ukraine’s workshop festival for emerging authors Propysy and a residency in Scotland within the project Phrases. Poetry in Translation. In 2025, she presented the art installation European Hedgehog at the European Forum Alpbach – a transparent blow-up imitation of a Czech hedgehog symbolizing hybrid threats and failure of European security system.

She has been working in NGOs since 2011. In a joint project of two organizations, Image Agency of Ukraine and Razom for Ukraine, she was involved in creation and in 2016, became head of the online monitoring system of mentions of Ukraine in 13 languages. She worked in communications and social innovations projects at PROUN, humanitarian and development projects.