Darka Shpykuliak

Born in 1995 in Kremenchuk, Poltava region. From childhood, she showed an aptitude for foreign languages, literature, and writing. She also acted in her school's theater troupe. At first, she wanted to become a military translator, so after 9th grade, she enrolled in a military lyceum, which she left in the second semester. Then, in 2012, she enrolled in the Military Institute of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, majoring in military journalism. That didn't work out either, so she decided that regular civilian translation wasn't bad either and enrolled at the Ostrogradsky National University in Kremenchuk, where she earned a master's degree in Germanic Languages and Literature (including translation). Darko now works remotely as an oral medical interpreter by phone and video for Canada and the United States.

Collages have always attracted her attention since her early years—with their audacity, boldness, freedom, even arrogance. However, art seemed to her to be an unattainable mystery behind seven seals, because her older sister, Zhanna Kondratenko, an artist, began painting at the age of about 4. This shaped her opinion that talent should only manifest itself in childhood. However, creativity and inventiveness have always been part of the artist's everyday life. And life has also shown that it is never too late to start.

When Darka was studying to be a translator at university, she became very interested in comics. And although her thesis revolved around the transmission of modality in translation, she dreamed of drawing her own comic. So she searched for tutorials on the internet and began to teach herself to draw with a simple pencil. However, this activity was met with mixed success — she would quit, then return, and so on. Before the full-scale Russian invasion, she attended classes at the Improv Workshop (improvisational theater, Lviv). She also taught herself to play the harmonica. In short, she often felt an acute need to express herself creatively and sought all possible ways to do so.

At the end of March 2025, Adriana Bermudez's book ABC of Collage illuminated a new direction in her creative path. An exercise in which an inanimate object had to be added to a figure instead of a human head resulted in her first collage, entitled “Waiting.” At that moment, she was overcome by a strong feeling that collage was something priceless and long lost, and that she had finally managed to find it after a couple of decades.

Those who seek shall find – that's how she came across Annette Sagal on Instagram, who later released her first author's collage course, “Dialogues.” Darka signed up for it without hesitation, and during the classes, she became even more convinced that collage is her inner home. Later, she decided to try her hand at the international collage festival CUTOUT 2025 and was among the winners, whose list included artists from almost every country in the world. The exhibition took place in November-December 2025 at the National Museum “Kyiv Art Gallery.” Daria's collage installations were then included, along with selected works from the CUTOUT festival, in the Zaporizhzhia Center for Contemporary Art.

Today, the artist is a resident of the CUTOUT COLLAGE ART PROJECT, where she is involved in new international projects, including “For the Sake of a Letter,” created in support of Ukrainian prisoners of war.