Larissa Poho

Larissa Pohoreski is a multidisciplinary performer, production designer, and visual artist currently residing in Edmonton. She has worked both locally and internationally, including performances across Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Poland and Ukraine, as an actor, vocalist, musician, lighting designer and dancer.

In 2019 she was hired by the Viter Ukrainian Dancers and Folk Choir in the role of Creative Director for their 25thAnniversary Show, for which she has also written a new 45-minute piece entitled Kalyna. In 2018 she was nominated for an Elizabeth Sterling Haynes Award for Best Original Score of a Play – Blood of Our Soil (Pyretic Productions). That year she was also named as one of the Alberta Council for Ukrainian Arts (ACUA)’s Top 30 Under 30 for her diverse skill sets and contributions to Alberta’s Ukrainian arts community. In 2019 she was honored by ACUA again with the Rena Hanchuk and Yaroslav Kitynskyy Award for Ukrainian Artistry. She is the inaugural Common Ground Arts Society (CGAS) Fresh AiR artist, and successfully wrote and produced an immersive site-specific theatrical production in the Edmonton River Valley (Before the River, 2017). Under the guise of Mavka Theatre, she creates work that merges contemporary aesthetic with folkloric inspiration. ThroughMavka, she is currently deep in the development of a new Ukrainian-bilingual piece of theatre, merging animation and live performance through integrated video-mapping.

Larissa is also an accomplished visual artist whose work has been featured at the Art Gallery of Alberta, ACUA Gallery, the Pysanka Museum in Kolomiya Ukraine, the Calgary Public Library, and Latitude53. Her pysanky (Ukrainian easter-eggs) have been featured on Global News, and in 2016 her mixed media piece, Hamaliya, was chosen for the Shevchenko Foundation Bookmark Campaign and was printed on 35,000 bookmarks distributed across Canada.

Larissa is passionate about continuing to explore the intersection between traditional Ukrainian and contemporary Canadian aesthetics.