Dmytro Krupka

Dmytro Krupka was born in Zaporizhzhia and lost his sight completely at the age of three. He says he does not remember himself sighted, only a few fragments: his own smiling face in a mirror, and his mother smiling at him. A course of treatment at the Filatov eye institute in Odesa was meant to help, but in 1971 the city was sealed under a cholera quarantine, and afterwards it was too late.

He trained at the Kharkiv medical college and stayed in the city to work as a masseur. For years he travelled as a volunteer to Staryi Skalat in the Ternopil region, where nuns had opened a rehabilitation centre for blind children. From 2014 he was active in Kharkiv public life, working as an assistant to a city council deputy on questions of barrier-free access, and he took part in the city's Euromaidan, where he met the writer Serhiy Zhadan; together they organised a festival for blind people called "Vich-na-vich".

Museums are what he loves. A visit to the museum of the Budy faience factory, where he was allowed to examine rare pieces of pottery with his hands, drew him into ceramics — he even sat down at a potter's wheel at a master class. Old rushnyky and Ukrainian embroidery drew him further, and over the years he built a collection: part of it he gave to a school for its ethnographic corner, and much of it he keeps himself. In 2018 he was among the first people to walk the Kharkiv Art Museum with its new audio guide, the first in Ukraine written for people who are completely blind. Until then, he said, he had stayed away from art museums on principle. "Every painting turns three-dimensional for me, like sculpture," he told the reporters. "I imagine each figure as though I were holding it in my hands."

He lived for a time in Poland with his family and now lives in Canada with his wife and their adult sons. He has already held exhibitions of his rushnyky here, with plenty of people wanting to see them, and he is trying to rebuild the rest of his Kharkiv work on this side of the ocean: tours that people can follow by touch, and a "Museum in the Dark" of the kind that already operates in Lviv and Kyiv, for which he is looking for investors. He is learning the kobza and the lira, and has got to know the bandura player and researcher Viktor Mishalov.

He has been part of the UAFest family since 2025, listed by the festival as an exhibitor and organiser. The 2026 festival is on Sunday, 13 September, in Riverside Park, Carleton Place.