Olexii Kuchanskyi studied cultural studies (BA and MA) at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. In 2020–2022, she worked as a research assistant in the project for establishing the video archive of the National Cinemateque of Ukraine, with an emphasis on the legacy of the Kyiv School of Popular Science Film. During and after completing her studies in 2022, she was working independently as an art writer and (co-)curated film screenings, programs, and exhibitions for the Kyiv Biennial, Coalmine–Raum Für Fotographie (Winterthur), e-flux Screening Room (NYC), BAK–basis voor actuele kunst (Utrecht), Zachęta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw), among others. She has been a member of eikones since 2024.

The dissertation project explores the Kyiv School of Popular Science Film (1960s–1980s), situating its practices within the history of film and media. Associated with the names of Felix Sobolev, Yevhen Zahdanskyi, Viktor Olender, Lev Udovenko, to name a few, the Kyiv School emerged on the institutional foundation of Kyivnaukfilm, Soviet Ukrainian popular science film studio. By formulating a method for producing cinematic images of theoretical knowledge, this film movement sought to bridge the gap between the sensuous and cognition, body and mind within the project of socialist educational cinema. The dissertation aims to reconstruct and study the Kyiv School’s approach to film and media and, therefore, pays particular attention to its inheritance of earlier Soviet theories of montage (e.g., Eisenstein’s “sensuous thinking” and Pudovkin’s neurological cinema) and transfiguration of them in light of the Kyiv School’s contemporary information theory, Soviet cybernetics and postwar experimental psychology. At the same time, by developing a critical archival approach, the project seeks to account for the agency of non-Russian Soviet cultures in the history of socialist art and media.