Lemko Research Foundation Board of Directors Member Board of Academic Advisors
Attended the Association for the Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) conference in Philadelphia, PA (2023). Five days of academic seminars, panels, roundtable discussions, exhibits, literary events, film screenings, and university press booksellers surrounding this year’s theme: Decolonization. For more information go to Lemko OOL | Organization for the Defense of Lemkischyna (OOL)

Master of Arts in Producing for Film and Video from American University, Washington, DC

With access to the Library of Congress during her studies, Christina researched OSS classified documents on UPA at the National Archives while completing her graduate degree. In 2004, she followed Julian “Levko,” a veteran resistance fighter, a soldier. They went to find his bunker. He started a program for the veterans who remained in Poland, Ukraine, and abroad in need of assistance, coordinated fundraisers, and served on the publishing house’s Board of Directors for Litopys – Chronicles of Ukrainian Insurgent Army UPA. She recorded 80 hours of interviews and events, recorded oral stories for a documentary based on Julian’s memoirs published in 2004, and organized an interactive exhibit on UPA at Soyuzivka Heritage Center with film clips from a documentary, Sons of the Forest- A Father’s Story, A Daughter’s Journey.


Columbia | Harriman Institute Ukrainian Studies Program Columbia University, NY 

Visiting Scholar for the academic year 2006-07. War and Society in Eastern Europe– 1939-Present, examined the Second World War and its legacies – wartime’s ongoing powerful emotional and political immediacy– as a catastrophic defining moment in the history and politics of modern Eastern Europe. Thematically, the material ranged from the everyday life of the nonmilitary populations to the history and legacy of responses within the whirlwind of occupation, deportation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. It covered the “lands between” Germany and Russia, including Ukraine and western parts of the Soviet Union, roughly identical with the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Baltic states, and part of the former Habsburg empire (minus Austria and the empire’s Italian possessions). Christina archives family letters, translating a little at a time, writing an ancestral history and memoir, Dudynce Diaries– Ancestral Roots of a Lemko Village.

Cultural | Documentary | Film Festivals

St. Nicholas Parish: a Century of Heritage and Community (2010), A year-long look at St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church parish community’s heart and soul, then and now, with archival footage and original music.  • Witness to Genocide (2009): A survivor of the Stalinist regime, 91-year-old Alexander Seweryn, bears witness to the 1932-33 genocide-famine Holodomor.  •  Sons of the Forest (2008), Based on the memoirs of a Ukrainian resistance fighter during World War II. • Lemkivski Vechirky (2003), Video Editor of original 16 mm film footage of Lemkivski Vechirky, An Evening of Song and Traditions in a Lemko Village. In the 1960s, it was written, produced, and directed by Julian Kotlar, co-written and starring Johanna Ivanka Kotlar, and a cast of characters that could only come out of a Lemko Village. Christina organized archives, photographs, documents, and ephemera from the productions intertwined with an introduction by Julian Kotlar and original scripts. This original stage production of life in a Lemko village was taken to Ukrainian diasporas throughout the United States and Canada.
• Ukrainian History and Education Center, Somerset County, NJ, designed exhibits and actively participated in the family genealogy weekends. • KINO-Q,  Ukrainian Film Festival  Soyuzivka Heritage Center, Kerhonkson, NY (2007-08). Curated, programmed and implemented a five-day film festival event, including Opening Night, daily film schedule, Q&A with filmmakers, roundtable discussion, special screenings, and Closing Night event.

Litopys Chronicles of Ukrainian Insurgent Army UPA, Board of Directors Member (2016); Administrator (2017)
Christina is credited for the compilation of Litopys UPA Ob’iednannia Kolyshnich Voiakiv, UPA, Volume 52. Providing primary source and archival material, she fell into a deeply interwoven rabbit hole that led to the inner workings of this Ukrainian veteran’s organization (Former Members of Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Inc.) After Julian died in 2009, Christina continued his work, telling their story through book publication of primary source material, journals, letters, memoirs, oral histories, photos, letters, official organizational documents, accounts of fundraising, books, reports, meetings, discussions, heated arguments etc., addresses, and family contact information from the 1950s-2019. A directive they were given on the eve of being disbanded: ordered to make their way to the West and tell their stories, save the military documents, orders, journals, and reports proving they were not a terrorist group but a hastily-trained army of teenage boys (who lied about their age) and young men into a formidable veterans organizations during its fifty-plus years of existence. OKV-UPA disbanded in September 2019. Christina is their official obituary writer. A directive. A duty.