Yevheniia studied literary theory and creative writing at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and wrote her postgraduate study about the digital shift in literature communication at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv under the guidance of Prof. Iryna Starovoyt.
Between 2008 and 2022, Yevheniia worked as an assistant producer and PR manager on various projects in Ukraine and abroad. She was also co-editor in the art & culture department of Zbruc.eu online magazine (2013-2018), program director at Art Council Dialogue NGO (2015-2021), and program coordinator at Czech Centre Kyiv (2020-2022), still writes as a critic and author for various independent media. As of May 2022, she now leads the Post Bellum Ukraine NGO team, collecting oral history interviews for the Memory of Nations public archive.
In 2014 Nesterovych won the II Award for the best interview in the Open Journalism Competition TEXT. In 2016 she got the I Award for the V Art Criticism Contest at Stedley Art Foundation. In 2016 Meridian Czernowitz PH published the book “Summa”, based on a long-form interview of Yevheniia Nesterovych with Yurii Izdryk.
„During the residency, I first of all enjoyed the healing silence and nature of the Borderland. I really needed this open space to look back on everything I had written and done in recent years. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, I have been forced to work more as a manager than as a writer. Some of my essays have been published in Dwutygodnik, others have been included in collections of criticism; but many ideas, especially fiction, have remained in the form of short dotted notes in the margins of the intensive work of building the Ukrainian branch of the international oral history archive memoryofnations.eu. For the past three years I have headed the NGO Post Bellum - Ukraine, and during that time we have collected nearly two hundred testimonies, created two films, an international exhibition and a number of media projects.
So, at the residency, I managed to conduct an 'audit' and systematization of my texts, drafts, and notes, and I finally had the strength, time, and a very suitable place to work on an essay about the experience of documenting women's oral history testimonies during the war. Throughout 2024, my team and I worked on the project 'Memory Keepers: Experiences of Ukrainian Women in Donetsk in the 20th - 21st Century,' within the framework of which we collected and processed testimonies from 27 women aged 40 to 79 from Kramatorsk in collaboration with various partners for different formats. It was a complex, large interdisciplinary project that involved seven different teams and required very attentive listening, engaged and sensitive processing of materials, and the creation of safe environments for discussing these experiences. It was very important for me to structure and articulate my reflections drawn from this work so that they wouldn't be forgotten and could also be useful to other colleagues working on this and related topics. I begin this essay with an epigraph taken from the poem by Victoria Amelina 'Testimony' - 'in this strange city, only women testify.' Victoria died in Kramatorsk, her birthday was recently; her collection was published in the series 'In the Face of War' - in which, in fact, I found this line to start with. A kind of non-random coincidence - as is often the case on the border."