I’ve become involved in ACTR programs since 2005 when I started teaching Russian and created my own program By the Onion Sea directed to both traditional and bilingual heritage high school students. Almost from the very beginning, my students started to participate annually and benefited greatly from the following ACTR programs: the Olympiada of Spoken Russian, the National Russian Essay Contest (pre-college), and the Russian Scholar Laureate Program. Over the years, my students got motivated to continue studying Russian and demonstrate their achievements through these programs, which have provided unique opportunities for them to gain ownership over their ability to learn Russian. Several students have been nominated as best traditional or heritage speakers of the Illinois Olympiadas, won the highest level prizes in the essay contest, and one student went to Moscow with the US Russian Olympiada team. My students and I took part in several STARTALK programs initiated and conducted by the ACTR Board members. Also, the participation in ACTR programs opened doors to my students for transformative study abroad learning opportunities through year-round, semester, and summer NSLI-Y programs and prestigious Russian college programs. The ACTR newsletter published two articles I wrote about my students’ participation in the ACTR programs and their Russian learning journeys.

Since ACTR programs had such an important impact on my students and on me as a teacher, I’ve been eager to give back to ACTR. In 2020, I was invited to serve as a member of the ACTR Olympiada Materials Committee for Heritage Learners, and in 2022, I was elected a member of the ACTR Board of Directors. Since then, I’ve served as a member of the Post-secondary National Russian Essay Contest Committee and the Olympiada Development Steering Committee. Right now, I am grateful for the opportunity to serve as Chair of the Pre-college Teaching Awards Committee, which manages the annual selection of recipients of the Excellence in Teaching awards for middle school and high school teachers of Russian, and Chair of the new Bridge-building Advocacy Committee, which develops materials for Russian programs to use in proactive and defensive advocacy. I’ve learned so much from the ACTR Board and the committees’ members I was privileged to serve with.

Professional leadership experience: I’ve created By the Onion Sea program to serve the community of Chicago and its suburbs. In addition to teaching Russian to traditional and heritage high school students, I started and led an adult reading study group “Life Readers” at the local library (2005-2021) and since 2007, I’ve developed and conducted adult seminars on Russian and Slavic literature, art, culture, and history at the research Newberry Library in Chicago (for more details, please see my resume and my website www.bytheonionsea.com). As an independent scholar, I presented at the AATSEEL and ASEEES conferences and conducted an ACTR webinar on Teaching Russian during the War through Contemporary Russian Visual Arts in 2024.

Community leadership experience: In 2022, I started an in-person book club for the Chicago area adult Russian speakers (both native, heritage, and traditional speakers) called “МЫ”, registered with Galina Yusefovich’s ARKA book club program. We’ve been discussing both classics and contemporary books in Russian. Our best discussions so far were on Zamyatin’s We, Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad, Margarita Khemlin’s The Investigator, and Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Text.

During 2023-2024, I volunteered as one of the organizers and participants for the Illinois initiative on writing letters to political prisoners in Russia. I involved my students in creating and writing postcards to political prisoners in Russia and Belarus as part of our curriculum.

I have also been volunteering at the Illinois Volo Bog state nature area for over 15 years as a weekend naturalist and a tour guide. I was nominated the Volunteer of the year in 2012 and again in 2023. For the last four years, I’ve served on the Friends of Volo Bog Board, leading on several major renovations: the installation of new teaching platforms in 2022, ordering and designing new trail map signs in 2023, and the installation of the observation blind in 2024. I am also a Master Naturalist with the U of Illinois Extension and volunteer with the Plants of Concern team of Chicago Botanic Garden.

I believe that a wide range of my professional and community leadership positions and initiatives will be of great use if I am honored to continue serving on the ACTR Board. The skills that I value most are passion, empathy, communication, active listening and learning, keeping an open mind, cooperation, accountability, flexibility, and decision-making.

As I am running for my second term to serve on the ACTR Board, I believe that my professional experience in teaching Russian to traditional and heritage high school students in the community program, combined with my work with adults and teaching content-based courses, could provide a unique balanced skill set that will be valuable on the ACTR Board. Because of a great variety of professional tasks I’ve been involved in, I learned to be a responsible person who is known for having things done in a timely way.

I am honored to serve on the Olympiada Development Steering Committee and would love to continue working on the Olympiada principles and materials. As a Chair of the Pre-college Teaching Awards Committee, I would love to attract more pre-college teachers to take part in this program, which upholds the best ACTR traditions. On the other hand, the Bridge-building Advocacy Committee, which I also chair, is a recent innovative initiative started by Lee Roby, the goal of which is identifying the ways that ACTR could effectively support the viability of Russian-language pre-college and college programs at all levels, promoting proactive advocacy strategies to entice students to enroll into Russian language programs, as well as building defensive advocacy strategies for threatened programs. We are in the middle of creating resources for proactive advocacy and will present an ACTR webinar on this work in Spring 2025, and we need to spend more time to establish and promote effective defensive policies. I would be honored to continue working on these important initiatives.

I am flexible and willing to be involved in the work of other ACTR committees as needed, including the ACTR Newsletter and other pre-college committees and initiatives.

Supporting Documentation for Candidacy