Ulyana Chava-McDonald is a designer and visual artist working across scenic design, costume design, and painting, based in Long Beach, California. Trained in both Ukraine and the United States, she holds a BFA in Visual Art and Design and an MFA in Design from the Lviv National Academy of Arts, and an MFA in Theatre Arts from California State University Long Beach. She works as a scenic designer in the Los Angeles area, bringing together Eastern European design traditions and contemporary American theatre.

Her paintings explore the boundary between surface and structure — layering oil paint with textile fragments, raw canvas, and mixed media to create works that are as much sculptural as painterly. The recurring motifs of organic form, vertical line, and embedded fiber trace a visual language rooted in craft, memory, and material.

The works on view are part of an ongoing series, Spring Interrupted — a body of work that holds disruption and joy simultaneously. Rooted in the devastating events unfolding in Ukraine and the parallel emergence of new life, the series gives visual form to what it means to grieve and bloom at the same time.

Her work has been exhibited at galleries in Los Angeles and Laguna Beach, including the juried exhibition Layers: Exploring Depth in Contemporary Art at TAG Gallery, Los Angeles, 2026.