Hello! My name is Gala and I started my professional way in filming and creating audio-visual works in 2020. Before that, I graduated from an Academy of Arts in Kyiv, where I studied theater directing, staged plays and acted in some of them. With my theater troupe we traveled a lot around Ukraine and participated in various theater festivals, where we sometimes won awards and exchanged experiences with other theaters. For a long time, I thought I would have stayed in the theater. But I had a prolonged depression that at some point paralyzed me as an artist.

Later, I moved to Lviv, worked for a while in a youth NGO, where I was filming, organizing various social projects, editing, made pictures, social media, and copywriting. And in 2020, just when the covid started, I founded the creative studio “What if” with my partner, where I started to implement everything I love - making music videos, social videos, advertisements, films, organizing various events for people from the artistic sphere, making social projects, and creative residencies. At the very beginning, I worked in “What if” as a director, scriptwriter, cinematographer, manager, editor, colorist, and at the same time worked on developing the studio and searching for new clients.

Working for myself helped me a lot to quickly learn everything about directing in the field of video and film, as well as self-education, books, online courses, and constant practice. Therefore, you can call me a self-taught filmmaker, although I try to transform my theatrical experience in a film field.

I am incredibly in love with directing, no matter what it is: theater, clip-making, cinema, etc. In addition to my studio, I am developing two more social projects: a free school called “What if creative school” for IDP children who were forced to move to Lviv because of the War in Ukraine; and the creative residence for artists called “Goryshche”, (this means “the attic” in Ukrainian) located in the Ukrainian Carpathians. I also have my own indie music band, called “Yellow Dog” (Жовта собака).

I'm not going to stop there. Despite the fact that my partner in the creative studio was killed in the war, protecting civilians, and despite the fact that every day I am in constant danger and anxiety, living in war, I want to continue our business, develop our projects, study, shoot, create, and talk about important things through what I create, through my videos, films, music, and other projects. I think this is my weapon in the fight against evil and ignorance.