INDEX Veteran Fellows and Residents 2026 Announced
We are pleased to announce that, in 2026, in addition to two programme Fellows, INDEX will also welcome two programme Residents who will work on their own projects.
During the first cycle, from January to March 2026, Mykola Hlibovych will join INDEX in Lviv as a Veteran Fellow, alongside Resident Alina Sarnatska.
About the Participants
— Mykola Hlibovych is a web designer, photojournalist, photographer and veteran. Until 2025, he served as a systems administration technician and project operator in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He is the co-author of the audiovisual project Reflections and Interludes (July 2023 – June 2025), a cycle of musical compositions written by Ostap Manulyak and inspired by Hlibovych’s abstract photographs of flowers taken during his military service, in particular, in the combat zone in the Donetsk region. The works were presented together with the photographs at concerts in Lviv in August 2023 and September 2024, and in Kyiv in October 2023.
Hlibovych’s project will take the shape of a photography exhibition in one of Lviv’s art spaces:
The project “Pretty Pictures from Ukraine Despite the War” is an attempt to sense the war through images of flowers. I began this series near Bakhmut when I was serving as a UAV operator in the 45th Separate Artillery Brigade named after Myron Tarnavskyi.
Mykola Hlibovych
— Alina Sarnatska is a writer, radio host, playwright, doctoral researcher in social work and veteran. From March 2022 to July 2024, she served as a combat medic in the infantry. Until 2025, she was a Jean-Jacques Rousseau Fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (Germany). In the same year, she became a finalist of the Aurora Drama Award (Poland), received two awards at the ATYPOWO festival in Wrocław, and won the Drama.ua competition (Ukraine). In 2024, she was awarded the July Honey Prize and the Week of Contemporary Play Award, and was a VILNO Fellow (Other Education / Robert Bosch Stiftung). In 2022, Sarnatska founded Teplonosiï, a charity that supports wounded soldiers in hospitals.
During her residency, Sarnatska will work on several projects:
Within the Veterans’ Programme, I want to implement a theatre project about the search for a shared language — one that brings together various experiences. It will be a performance about strength and overcoming fear. The fellowship will also support my work on the radio where I host a programme about veterans and those bringing victory closer in various ways, as well as my work on a book about society at war in its truthful expressions.
Alina Sarnatska
Details about the participants of the second cycle and their projects will be announced later in 2026.
The Selection Committee’s Feedback
— Yurii Vovkohon:
Sarnatska’s plays are like the raw, visceral reality of war — absolutely truthful and searing. This is an unvarnished, sharply focused view of a person in wartime, pushing our thoughts deeper, toward the meaning of human life.
Hlibovych does not depict the realities of war, nor does he exploit its contrasts or emphasise its phenomena. He creates a new aesthetic that shows life that exists within the war, alongside it and despite it. At times this perspective speaks more powerfully than a hundred explanations. It is a highly aesthetic, complex, multilayered project that can find support only from institutions with sufficient expertise. At the same time, its message can be felt and understood by every visitor.
— Aliona Karavai:
Alina is an important feminist voice in the veteran community, addressing the uncomfortable realities faced by women when serving in the military and after demobilising. She has already proven herself a productive and determined author. I hope the residency in Lviv will give her meaningful support, both for developing new projects and for a much-needed change of environment and recovery.
Mykola Hlibovych is already known to Lviv audiences for Ostap Manulyak’s musical performance in dialogue with his photographs. The programme can provide the support needed to strengthen and continue interdisciplinary artistic work and to bring together different “bubbles” of Lviv.
— Liana Mytsko:
Alina brings the direct language of the war into public discourse — the kind that is convenient to conceal. Yet only through shared experience of trauma and its open reflection can we understand what people who have gone through combat truly feel. Her experience and her ability to convey it so truthfully give her plays exceptional power.
Mykola presents a carefully considered project. His photographs from the front reveal a new dimension of lived experience. In the details he captures, a kind of harmony seems to emerge despite the surrounding chaos. His work reminds us that it is worth seeking aesthetic meaning even in the darkest of times.
— Sasha Dovzhyk:
The competition attracted exceptionally strong applications. The main lesson we drew from the assessment process is the urgent need for a dedicated programme for active-duty service members who wish to document their experience.
— Olesya Yaremchuk:
Photographer Mykola Hlibovych captured the absurdity of reality: soldiers in a hall filled with balloons, cats with weapons, a figure in camouflage who survived a missile strike on Yavoriv standing against a backdrop of a painted children’s train. He seeks to understand what remains when the uniform disappears and reflects on how abstraction can preserve memories of the war.
Playwright and researcher Alina Sarnatska served as a combat medic in the infantry from March 2022 to July 2024. She is now developing a project about the search for a shared language that unites different experiences, and she writes about resilience, trauma and social justice. These initiatives align closely with the core mission of INDEX — documentation of the war.
You can find more information about the INDEX Veteran Programme via the link. Details about the selection committee members are available here.
This material was prepared with the support of the RAZOM Foundation. The material represents the views of the authors and does not necessarily reflect those of RAZOM.