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When: February 22 @ 6pm
Where: Felicity R. “Bebe” Benoliel Gallery,
237 S 18th Street, Suite 3A
Philadelphia, PA 19103
Please join us for a conversation about the history and contemporary context of displacement, war and the refugee crisis both in Ukraine and the Baltic States.
Guest speakers will include Saint Joseph’s University Professor Melissa Chakars, Mary Kalyna the daughter of post-World War II Ukrainian Displaced Persons and a life-long social justice activist along with Latvian/Lithuanian artist Krista Svalbonas.
Dr. Melissa Chakars is professor and chair of the Department of History at Saint Joseph’s University. She specializes in Eurasian history with a focus on the Mongolian and Siberian peoples of Russia. She has published numerous articles on topics of empire, identity, media, religion, and gender, as well as two books: The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia and the co-edited volume Modernization, Nation-Building, and Television History. She is currently working on a book about the history of Buddhism in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, as well as an edited volume about Buryat-Mongolian intellectuals at the turn of the 20th century.
Mary Kalyna is the daughter of post-World War II Ukrainian Displaced Persons and a life-long social justice activist. Since 2013, she has organized events in Philadelphia support of Ukraine, in particular opposing Russia's invasion, and is recognized as a spokesperson for the Ukrainian community. A graduate of Cornell University with an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, she is a writer and researcher whose current focus is documenting the experience of Ukrainian forced laborers and Displaced Persons in Nazi Germany. Mary’s writing has appeared in the Ukrainian Weekly, Philadelphia Citizen, and other publications. Her poetry translations are included in the anthology Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. Mary was born in upstate New York and now lives in Mt. Airy in Philadelphia.
Krista Svalbonas holds a BFA in Photography and an MFA in Interdisciplinary studies. Her work has been shown in a number of exhibitions including: the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Spartanburg Art Museum in South Carolina, Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston and Klompching Gallery and ISE Cultural Foundation in New York. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Cesis Art Museum in Latvia, the Gregg Museum of Art and Design in North Carolina and the Woodmere Art Museum and Temple University in Philadelphia. Recent awards include a Center for Photographic Art Artist Grant (2022), Baumanis Creative Projects Grant (2020), Rhonda Wilson Award (2017), Puffin Foundation Grant (2016) and a Bemis Fellowship (2015) among others. In 2022/23 Svalbonas had solo exhibitions of her series Displacement, at the Copenhagen Photography festival in Denmark, the Tallinn city museum in Tallinn, Estonia, Museum of Textile and Industry in Augsburg Germany and the National Museum in Vilnius Lithuania. She is an associate professor of photography at St. Joseph’s University. She lives and works in Philadelphia.