Biography
Alona Penzii is the Head of the Archive Department at the Dovzhenko Centre, film critic and curator. Since 2018, she has been working at the Dovzhenko Centre, where she focuses on the history of Ukrainian non-fiction film, in particular animation. She has organized retrospectives of Ukrainian animation at international and national venues, including: Slava Ukraini! Animation (2022) at The Cinémathèque Française, Degrees of Freedom: Censorship and Propaganda in Animation (2023) at the StopTrik International Film Festival, Volodymyr Honcharov in Close-up (2023) at the LINOLEUM Contemporary Animation and Media Art Festival, Potatoes and Kings: Folk, Political, and Absurd in Ukrainian Animation (2024) at the Ottawa International Animation Festival.
She was a co-curator of film programs at the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture (DCCC): Front-line Geographies (2022), Futurity (Maibuttia) (2023), I Don’t Like Nature as It Is (2024). In 2023, she co-curated the exhibition The River Wailed Like a Wounded Beast at the Kyiv Biennale. She is a board member at the National Film Critics Award KINOKOLO. As a film critic, she contributes to LB.ua, Ukrainska Pravda and other media.
