Merzhiyevska Valentyna

Education worker, author of books, educational materials and board games, co-founder of the alternative school BerkoShko and Valency NGO. Co-author of the podcast RePainted Fox.

She holds an MA in mechanical engineering from the National Transport University (2003). Before 2012, she worked in the Laboratory for Fuel Use and Environmental Studies.

Since 2011, she has been a co-founder and head of the alternative school BerkoShko in Kyiv. She teaches math, science, mythology, philosophy, rhetoric and critical thinking. She used her teaching experience for creating a series of exercise sets in mathematics, an anatomy tutorial for junior school and conducting various seminars. Since 2024, she has been the curator of the Teenage Film Club from Docudays UA at BerkoShko.

She is the author of non-fiction and educational books such as TimeLine ("ЧасоЛінія", awarded for the best book design in 2024), Calendatics ("Календатика"), and she is a co-author of a series of navigators in the history of Ukraine. She is the author of essays and columns on the issues of national identity, education and social transformations written for the media such as NV: Views, OsvitaNova etc.

Merzhiyevska works with the topics of memory culture and historical reflection in education. She participated in Centropa Summer Academy (2022, 2023) and the educational research project called the Laboratory of Memorialization Practices (2024). In 2022, she organized educational initiatives for Ukrainian children and teenagers in Krakow at the Jewish Museum Galicia and Wojewódzka Biblioteka Publiczna w Krakowie.

She is a co-founder of the Valency.Reconsidering NGO; within it, she is the author and curator of projects such as Linguocide, MemoryCraft, In a Minute etc.

Since 2021, she has been a co-author of the podcast RePainted Fox; within it, she reconsiders Ukrainian literary classics through the lens of psychology and Ukrainians’ newest experience together with Mariia Didenko. In 2024, the podcast was awarded the Slushno Prize. She is also the author of literary board games based on the plots from Ukrainian classic literature.