Helena Kernan graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2016. Since then, she has lived in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kyiv, where she has worked with a documentary theatre collective, the Ukrainian Centre for Civil Liberties, and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.
Helena translates contemporary poetry from Russian into English and has spent time in Perm collaborating with the Russian human rights organization Memorial to produce an exhibition dedicated to victims of Stalinist repression. Her translation of “Only You, Chechnya” by Elena Kostyleva was published in the journal Modern Poetry in Translation in 2017. She is currently a graduate student in Slavic languages and literatures at UC Berkeley, where she is working on contemporary poetry, postsocialist memory, and performance art in the Russian-speaking world.