ABOUT THE Team

TAIS OLEKSANDRIVNA PODA is a creative producer, art director, and specialist in using modern visual technologies for culture and museums. She is also a scientist and a founder of the RocknLight studio.

When working on the exhibition «Ukraine: Land of the Brave», Tais started with the creation of the concept, and then as an artistic director worked on video content together with a team of talented designers.

For Tais, this is not the first time when she works to create an immersive exhibition, as she has been working in this field for more than 10 years.
For six years Taisiya was a partner and worked in "Front Pictures". Being an artistic director in this company, she created the first immersive exhibitions in Ukraine which were exhibited in the multimedia "A-Gallery" at ArtMall center. These exhibitions showed the art of the Renaissance, Impressionism, and Avant-garde.

In 2019, Tais Poda founded her own studio. One of the first projects created in RocknLight was the audiovisual show "Discover Ukraine: Bit by Bit", dedicated to Ukrainian mosaics of the 1960s. This project was exhibited on the facade of the Leopold Museum in Vienna during the official “Days of Ukrainian Culture in Austria” season. After the start of the war, this show was screened in several European countries and Great Britain, as a story about the monumental art that Ukraine is losing in this war. It is known that almost a third of the mosaics represented in the project were already destroyed by the russian invaders.

Tais has been involved in the preservation of cultural heritage. She is a member of the International Council of Museums (ICM) and PhD in international law (legal aspects of digitalization of world cultural heritage), and also she works as a researcher at the Modern Art Research Institute (National Academy of Art of Ukraine).

Tais combines her career in visual arts with scientific activities, studying the connection between art and other social sciences (psychology, anthropology, and law).

So, already having considerable experience, in 2021-2022 Tais joined our team to create the immersive exhibitions "The Immersive World of Taras Shevchenko" and "Ukraine – the Land of the Brave".

We thank her and the extraordinary team of designers who worked on these exhibitions, for a significant contribution to the widespread truths about the events in Ukraine and the popularization of the Ukrainian cultural heritage in the world.

Tais says about the work on the project "Ukraine – the Land of the Brave":
"I was given about hundreds of hours of video footage and thousands of photos, which had to be reviewed and selected for the exhibition. Most of them are documentary evidence of atrocities committed by the occupiers on our native land. It is extremely difficult to watch. But at the same time, the question arose of how to show all these things to people in other countries. This war is "not their" war. Do people want to look at these horrors, or do they simply pass by to protect themselves from a traumatic experience?

I hesitated for a long time, and then I realized that it is necessary to tell individual human stories, because these are emotions. If people have compassion and humanity preserved in themselves, they understand what this is all about.

We worked with really hard-to-watch documentary material. But there is no other way when you are trying to show the truth to people in other countries and cultures. It is necessary to make people see and realize that right here and now, in the 21st century, such inhuman things are happening. We all considered it to be impossible after World War II. But now this absolute evil has returned. And fighting against it, Ukrainians are paying the highest price, which is human life."