I was born in Ukraine and have lived in Switzerland for the past nine years.
Dance has been part of my life since I was four. I grew up in a traditional folk dance collective — a strict one — and it gave me the three things I still teach today: discipline, presence, and the ability to work as part of a group rather than in front of it.
Later I earned a Master's degree in choreography and spent years teaching children and teenagers. I loved it. I thought that was the shape my life would keep.
Then I moved to Switzerland, and everything I had built stopped applying. Folk dance had no place here, and neither did the version of myself that came with it. I had to find out who I was without the thing I'd been since I was four.
That's when I found heels. And I started from zero.
It was frightening — genuinely, not charmingly. I was a trained choreographer standing at the back of a beginners' class, learning to walk. But little by little, heels gave me back something I hadn't realised I'd lost: my confidence, my sensuality, my sense of being at home in my own body as a woman.
Today I run my own studio in Zurich. More than 300 women have trained with me here.
Alongside that, I've kept learning — training with internationally renowned choreographers, attending workshops and dance camps abroad, never letting myself teach from memory. That's what shaped the way I work: clear, grounded in real technique, and emotional without ever being vague.
Almost none of the women who walk into FEMOTION arrive confident. They arrive curious, a little nervous, usually apologising for their own body before the music even starts. I know that woman well. I was her.
I don't just show you the moves. I help you feel them — in your body, in your mind, and in the way you carry yourself when you leave.
I don't want a room of women dancing the same way. I want each of them to find how she moves — and to stop asking permission to take up space.
The heels are just how we get there.