08/25/2026
For this month’s , we are thrilled to announce that Daria Hulak-Kulchytsky is the 2026 recipient of the OAC’s Ohio Heritage Fellowship. Hulak-Kulchytsky, who lives in North Royalton near Cleveland, is a master icon painter/writer in the Ukrainian tradition whose work has adorned churches, museums, and homes for the past 40 years.
Hulak-Kulchytska’s father, a painter and an agronomist, was her first art teacher. Their family fled Ukraine in 1944 and lived in a displaced persons camp in Germany before moving to Canada when she was eight. She became a science teacher, but art remained a strong passion. Because her husband was a university professor, she was able to take free art and art history courses at Youngstown State University in the evenings. Then on a trip to Ukraine in 1984, she had an experience that changed the course of her life.
In the city of Chernivtsi, she saw piles of rubbish outside a Catholic church, and among the rubbish she saw a mangled icon. Inside the church she saw another destroyed painting, as Soviet and communist authorities sought to remove all traces of religion from everyday life. She was devastated to see these pieces of religious art destroyed, and decided at that moment to become an icon painter/writer and help preserve this endangered tradition.
Hulak-Kulchysty has painted/written icons in three full churches, and at her home studio she is finishing the final pieces for her parish of St. Andrew Ukrainian Catholic Church in Parma, Ohio. Her work hangs in the Ukrainian Museum Archives in Cleveland, as well as other institutions throughout the United States and abroad. For members of the Ukrainian community, she is often commissioned to paint icons of the Virgin Mary and Jesus for brides and grooms.
As her nominator wrote, “Perhaps most importantly, her work ensures that traditional arts remain a functional part of her community’s daily life, rather than simply a relic of the past. In this context, art is not just seen, it is lived. It serves as a visual anchor, reminding the public of their shared identity and the continuity of the Ukrainian cultural fabric.” Congratulations Daria Hulak-Kulchytsky!
