Mariia Yakobchuk is a Ukrainian movement artist and filmmaker whose practice explores identity, displacement, and resilience through the body and visual storytelling. Trained in Kyiv within street and commercial dance forms, she later shifted toward contemporary and interdisciplinary practices, developing a personal movement language rooted in improvisation and transformation. Her early career included extensive training, stage performances, and collaborations with musicians and choreographers, forming a strong technical and performative foundation.
Since 2020, her work has evolved toward authorship, focusing on movement as a tool for research and expression. She has collaborated with Ukrainian artists and companies, including Apache Crew, and participated in international programs such as Tanzwerkstatt Europa and the Fonds Darstellende Künste grant “After Becoming Fluent,” where she deepened her choreographic and conceptual practice.
Relocating abroad marked a turning point in her artistic direction. Her projects increasingly reflect the experience of migration and the reconstruction of belonging. Alongside performance, she began working with video and film, directing movement-based works that merge cinematic and choreographic thinking. In 2024, she wrote and produced her first short film, „KUKLA”, which explores the inner co
Her practice continues to unfold between dance, film, and visual art, engaging the body as a living archive shaped by rupture, memory, and transformation.