Yuriy Pestov’s films were selected, shown and finalists at quite a few festivals, including GSF Awards at Cannes Film Festival, Cyprus International Film Festival, Chhatrapati Shivaji International Film Festival among others.
Having graduated from School #190 at Mukhina Institute of Applied Arts in St. Petersburg, Russia, Yuriy Pestov decided to take advantage of his home being right next door to The State Institute of Theater and Cinema. Finding many friends there he studies the theater and cinema fervently. The most innovative at the time in the country The State Maliy (Mikhailovskiy) Theater of Opera and Ballet, where he worked and made a stage design for a ballet choreographed by Leonid Lebedev (banned by The Communist Party as too innovative at that pre-Perestroika Soviet time), was also his big influence. While studying further photography and visual art at La Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venezia in Venice, Italy and other places and having success with his exhibitions and residencies around the world, he studies ballet and contemporary dance. In 2001 he receives Anderson Ranch Art Center in Aspen, Colorado creative portrait photography workshop and travel grant and a visual art residency and two awards in United States and moves there. In San Francisco Bay Area he performs and presents his choreography at about all venues, along with visual art and photography exhibitions. Being mindful of the zeitgeist and technology, he decides to dedicate his dance exclusively to the medium of screen dance along with work in experimental documentary films. His approach to dance films is a unique blend of his choreography combined with profound knowledge of the screen from his photographic experience and an acute and opulent visual-art-world input. This holistic oeuvre creation is facilitated by Yuriy Pestov being, along with the director, the editor, and usually the cinematographer of the films.