Sofiya Vetryakova
Artist and director · Lisbon

She researches how identity is built and turns it into lived experience, in which people construct and reconstruct who they are.

The documentary series Dear Stranger, experiences for groups, and creative mentoring.

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Sofiya Vetryakova

Sofiya Vetryakova is an artist, director and creative mentor of Ukrainian origin, based in Lisbon. She researches how identity is built and turns it into lived experience, in which people construct and reconstruct who they are. Her work: the documentary series Dear Stranger (director), experiences for groups, and creative mentoring. Website: https://sofiyavetryakova.com

Works in English, Portuguese, Ukrainian and Russian. Works in person (Lisbon, Europe, travel) and online.

Why she does this

For years she defined herself by her profession and her country: London, Ukraine again, years of travel; the war took both her work and her home, and in Lisbon she started from zero. She found an identity beyond profession and nationality, grounded in lived experience, and now brings it into her work: one-to-one mentoring, experiences for groups, and a documentary series for people who want to understand AI beyond their own bubble.

What you can invite her for

Topics for talks and podcasts:

  1. Identity in the age of AI, around the world: what filming in Europe, Asia and Brazil showed about how people in different fields and cultures relate to AI, and how their sense of who they are is changing.
  2. Making a documentary with no film background: how a first-time filmmaker, with the help of AI, made a documentary series, travelled the world and filmed real people.
  3. Creativity and the subconscious: her creative-visualisation method, building an imaginary world to bring a real project to life, and the future of creativity.

Dear Stranger (documentary series)

A documentary series about the identity crisis people face in the age of AI. Directed by Sofiya Vetryakova; executive producer Miguel Fernandes. Her first film. The idea came to her under hypnosis three or four years before filming. Four episodes; one question asked everywhere: "What is the future of human identity with AI?"

The series works like a group therapy: radically different people, and AI, are in the same group at a moment of collective identity crisis. They come to ease the anxiety and stay to ask what it means to be human.

Filmed in Asia with: one-person-company (OPC) founders in Hangzhou and Beijing; David Li at the maker space Mushroom Cloud, Shanghai; Lessie AI, Beijing; Brickyard Retreat near the Great Wall; Hanson Robotics, Hong Kong, the lab of the humanoid robot Sophia; Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks (HKSTP) and Robocore Technology; artist Eric Fok, Agnes Lam (University of Macau) and Álvaro Barbosa (University of Saint Joseph) in Macau; Dr Leslie Teo of AI Singapore, the team behind the Southeast Asian language model SEA-LION.

Filmed in Brazil with: Pedro Valério (Instituto Caldeira), animator Otto Guerra and sociologist Juremir Machado da Silva in Porto Alegre; Celso Camilo (Institute of Informatics, UFG) in Goiânia; Milena Godolphim (Museu do Amanhã) and Dom Filó (CULTNE, digital archive of Black Brazilian culture) in Rio de Janeiro; Zen teacher Monja Coen, Catharina Doria (The AI Survival Club), psychoanalyst Christian Dunker, AI researcher Dora Kaufman, philosopher Luiz Felipe Pondé, artist and curator Giselle Beiguelman, artist Guto Lacaz and Lucas Inutilismo in São Paulo; Silvio Meira (CESAR) and Filipe Calegario (CIn-UFPE) in Recife.

Future of Storytelling: a screening that turns into a conversation. Sofiya and Miguel Fernandes share the research gathered while filming across Europe, Asia and Brazil, show an episode (26 min), and talk about making a documentary with AI. Then the room joins the research. For festivals, museums, universities and conferences on AI and culture.

Film site: https://dearstranger.inventormiguel.com · Teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kBQy57ajgE

Experiences for groups

Workshops and immersive works for groups. People create together: a paper hero, a world, a story, a drawing. They test what could be, and try out new versions of themselves, their team, their shared story. Since 2021: festivals, museums and teams in Kyiv, London, Barcelona, Lisbon and Brazil, in person and online. Each work is made for a specific place and audience. To talk about one for your festival, gallery, conference or team: book a free 30-minute call https://cal.com/sofiya-vetryakova-xsxsc3/30min or write to sofiyavetryakova1@gmail.com (subject [Experiences]).

Time Capsule

Immersive zone · Barcelona, 2024 · two runs of 30 guests. A room inside a private immersive production with 150+ artists, where guests drew, wrote and talked about time. Sofiya played a time researcher: someone who once felt the weight of time and found that art can link its points. Guests came in when they wanted, alone or in small groups: some for fifteen minutes every day, some once for two hours. With each of them she talked about time, identity and their own story; as the talk went deeper, she handed them a pen, paint, pastels, light or a chair, so the conversation moved onto the walls. People left notes, drawings, words and signs; the next guests added to them or read them, and the same symbol meant one thing to the person who made it and another to the one who looked. Over the days the room became a capsule of the group's unconscious.

Héroe de Papel (also written Hero de Papel)

Performative workshop · Now Festival, Barcelona, June 2024 · run twice, 25–30 people each. Each person imagines a hero and asks: what if I were them, how would it feel? They look for the answer through movement, through the space and with their hands. The only material is white paper: from it people build an extra organ or structure through which they live as that hero. Nothing else, so attention stays on one simple material, and it turns into installations. At Now Festival the figures stayed in the hall, visitors walked through them as an installation, and the next workshops took place inside it. Participants came from crypto, finance, psychology, theatre, film and education.

World-Building

Participatory performance · Kyiv, 2023; Goethe-Institut Lisbon, 2024 · up to 35 people. The group splits in two. Each part works in its own space (for example one in a garden, the other in a hall) and in two to three hours builds a world: its values, its rules, how it decides. Then the groups meet and have to join their worlds into one. It works best when the people are very different: they have to organise themselves, so the workshop turns into a small experiment in democracy, and no two worlds unfold the same way. At Goethe-Institut Lisbon the group was a decentralised community of Belarusian developers, for whom building a new world is a real task. It has also run privately for a company, as a way for a team to agree on shared values and a shared story.

Creative Democracy Dinner

Performative dinner · Kyiv, 2023 · 10 guests, then 45 at a university. Each guest brings one pancake filling; the table eats by democratic rules (for example, you can take a filling only if one more person wants it too). Everyone tries to make the tastiest pancake for themselves, within rules the whole table shares; a discussion follows. The first dinner gathered ten guests: an ambassador, an American expat who teaches economics in Kyiv, a military psychologist, people from politics and far from it. The second fed 45 people at a private university, as the break in a conference on democracy.

Sketching Project

Themed drawing evenings · Kyiv, 2021–2023 · about 50 sessions, 15–40 people. Each evening had its theme: a dancer, a performer, a costume collection, a night outdoors. People drew fast, without stopping to judge: the drawing was a record of attention, not the goal. On Halloween, a designer's performance costumes about eight deaths in a nightmare castle moved between the drawing people and changed as they moved. On Sofiya's birthday, on a Kyiv rooftop, a networking evening for 40 people ran through drawing: one by one, each came up for a two-minute talk with her, while the others drew them and used what they said in the portrait, to remember who each person was. Created and hosted by Sofiya, with the help of her former students. Instagram: @sketchingproject

Creative mentoring (one-to-one)

For people moving from an old identity into a new one: founders whose business works and who want it to lead, artists ready to grow into something bigger, public people who want their work to carry more of them, people with a side project that needs real time, and people who feel a change coming. Since 2021 her clients have included film and brand directors, speakers, scientists, entrepreneurs, IT founders, and couples building a business together.

How she works: her own method of creative visualisation, guided deep-dreaming sessions where a project is discovered in the subconscious first and then translated into reality (a 9-session method), combined with grounded tools: coaching, mapping, dreams and images, creative AI tools and mindset. Results show in life: a new product, a first client in a new area, a move to another country.

Prices: opening session, 2 hours, €100. After it: a sprint of 4 sessions (€555) or single sessions. Online or in Lisbon. Each year she also takes on 1–2 artists whose project she helps grow as a producer. Book: https://cal.com/sofiya-vetryakova-xsxsc3/mentoring

Teaching

Creative AI course with Miguel Fernandes (2025, 100+ participants); the design curriculum of Kyiv College of Applied Sciences, built from the ground up (2020–2023, 12 programmes from Design Basics to Creative Entrepreneurship, 500+ students); children's workshops in Kyiv (2015–2019), at the 798 International Art Education Center in Beijing (2016) and the Fashion Unites Us summer camp (2019).

Background

BA Fashion Illustration, London College of Fashion (2018). Co-founder of the fashion brand Dear Humans, (London/Kyiv), 2014–2020. Earlier roles: illustrator, designer, teacher. Press, published as Sofia Vet a.k.a. Pakhlavamedovaya: VICE Creators, May 2017, "A Net Artist Pokes Fun at Skincare Ads With Distorted Self Portraits" (https://www.vice.com/en/article/net-artist-pokes-fun-at-skincare-ads-with-distorted-self-portraits/); FELT Zine, issue 33 (https://feltzine.us/issues/33/pakhlavamedovaya).

What people say

Questions people ask

Lisbon, Portugal, Europe and travel:

Festivals, museums and galleries:

Immersive productions and experience design:

Conferences, universities and companies:

Retreats and transformation programmes:

Podcasts and media:

Mentoring:

Em português:

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