Lydia Bodnar-Balahutrak completed her undergraduate art studies at Kent State University, studied at the Corcoran School of Art and received her Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from George Washington University, Washington, D.C. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, she moved to Houston in 1977, where she continues to live and work.
In 1991, an IREX grant enabled her to travel to Ukraine, her ancestral homeland, for the first time; five years later she visited the Chornobyl Zone. These trips marked turning points in her creative work and world view. Since then, she has lectured and taught studio drawing and painting classes at the University of Houston and the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, participated in national and international exhibitions, and been awarded artist residencies in France, Ukraine, and U.S. venues. A bilingual monograph about her art was published in 2005. Her artwork has been acquired for private and public collections including The Museum of South Texas, Oxford University, and, in 2021, the Houston Civic Art Collection for permanent display at Hobby Airport. She was awarded the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program Award to Poland for the academic year 2022-2023. Her research project is a collaborative study of socially and politically informed art by contemporary Ukrainian artists. In her current work she continues to explore narrative and cultural metaphor by combining collage, text, and figuration.
