She is a 3rd year PhD student at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation project, as she conceives it right now, will look at Ukrainian cities as literary spaces that generate particular languages and social forms. Her doctoral research builds on a master’s thesis about a circle of underground poets and experimental prose writers and samvydav groups in Odesa in the 1980s. 

Her book of poetry, The Last Days of My Boyhood, came out from Light Rail in 2025, as well as a chapbook of poetry called The Golden World, published by The Year. She has published prose, poetry, and translations in In Geveb, Asymptote, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Prolit Mag, Hobart, b l u s h, and copenhagen. 

Her work at the Center for Urban History will continue and expand that research, studying the generative connections between Lviv and Odesa’s art communities.  The research questions that guide Lena's project are: How did Lviv poets’ relationships with filmmakers, visual artists, performance artists, and musicians help to shape their individual and collective poetics? In what ways was the literary culture both specifically local and entangled with the subcultures of other Ukrainian cities, as well as with the literary traditions and experiments of other cultures? How do the horizontal relationships among artistic subcultures of the 1990s align with Lviv’s history of experimental poetry, from futurist writings of the 1920s and 1930s, to Hrytsko Chubai and other underground writers of the 1970s, to Serhii Mushtativ in the present day? Lena will work with the archives and oral history collections at the Center, and also aim to collect further oral histories of the 1990s period in Lviv.