Maryana Bodnar is a Ukrainian visual artist, portrait photographer, and photography educator. She is a Gold Winner of the 2025 edition of the Tokyo International Foto Awards.
Her artistic practice is rooted in portraiture as a psychological and visual study. Bodnar works with actors, musicians, mothers of soldiers, and private individuals, approaching each subject as a collaborator. Her images are constructed through disciplined composition, sculptural light, and a restrained visual language that emphasizes emotional precision.
War has become a defining context of her recent practice. Her award-winning project “Fractured Frequency” approaches the body as a site of disruption, where visual interference, distortion, and compositional fracture become metaphors for internal states shaped by conflict and prolonged tension. The project reflects on how constant shelling, sirens, and daily reports of casualties fracture inner balance, shaping states of emptiness, aggression, and paralysis. The project received Gold at the 2025 edition of the Tokyo International Foto Awards.
The project “Don’t Be Silent. Captivity Kills”, created in collaboration with families of Azovstal defenders, reflects on the emotional condition of women advocating for relatives held in captivity. The series was presented at the National Art Gallery of Ukraine and Kosenko Art Gallery in Bucha.
Her audio-visual project “Lullaby. In the Embrace of War” explores motherhood within wartime reality. Drawing from chiaroscuro traditions and minimalist iconography, the project examines grief, waiting, and the fragile continuity between mother and child in conditions of absence and uncertainty.
Alongside her artistic practice, Bodnar teaches photography, focusing on portrait construction, light as narrative structure, and the development of an authorial visual language. Her pedagogical approach emphasizes analytical thinking and conceptual clarity.
Her works were also presented at Art@theGrange during The Grange Festival in England in 2022.