Rights Information

Rights manager from ADEF-Ukraine Kate Pashchenko +380938899229

Rights owner Tetyana Zez

Contact of the Ukrainian Book Institute: ubi@ubi.org.ua

Author Biography

A musician by education, she moved from Donetsk to Kyiv in 2014, and the full-scale war forced the woman and her family to change their place of residence again. Now she lives in Lviv, where she continues her passion for embroidery, which she began to be interested in back in Donetsk. "I started embroidering as a sign of protest when Yanukovych came to power. I believed that our people from Donetsk cannot be allowed to come to power. I wanted to give my husband a shirt, but I decided to embroider it myself. There was an embroidery club at the library, I started studying there," recalls Tetyana Zez. At first, the woman was fascinated by old shirts and ethnographic embroidery. Later, the project "Embroidery in the clothes of prominent Ukrainians" was born. For each shirt, Tetyana Zez chooses an ambassador to present it. These are usually famous people, politicians, representatives of the same professions whose embroidered shirt they bought. For example, the project started with the shirt of the composer Mykola Lysenko - it was presented by the leader of the band Kozak System, Ivan Lenyo. The director Akhtem Seitablayev presented the embroidery of the founder of the first Ukrainian theater Mykhailo Starytskyi. The artist Irma Vitovska was in the image of Maria Zankovetska. Tatyana gave Shevchenko's shirt, the original of which is in the Shevchenko estate museum in Kyiv, to her countryman and the first ambassador of the project, a political prisoner from Donetsk Ihor Kozlovsky. According to Tatiana, people also remember museums by their shirts. "We cooperate with museums that admit us to funds - there are already 11 such museums. We take those things that were left after famous people and show that such things exist, that our elite identified themselves thanks to these clothes. When it was necessary to demonstrate their belonging to the nation, they wore these embroidered dresses," Tetiana Zez explains the idea of ​​the project. The craftswoman distributes the schemes of all embroidery on printed postcards, and if desired, everyone can embroider them themselves.