A look behind the scenes of the Ukrainian Cultural Festival, and why showing up matters.
“October is Ukrainian culture month,” we’ve heard around New York City over the past few years. And for us, that is one of the clearest signs of what Razom’s Ukrainian Cultural Festival (UCF) has become.
This is our fourth year, and in 2026 we are reaching new stages, new audiences, and new partners across the city. As producers curating performing arts programming for Razom for Ukraine, we get to see the vision come to life each year, from our very first brainstorming sessions to the final moments when the theater and venues are restored to their original forms and everything gets quiet again.
This year, we have the privilege of partnering with the Alexander & Buono Foundation to open the festival at Carnegie Hall with the US premiere of Ukrainian composer Oleg Bezborodko’s Steel, Violet, Rage, performed by the Shelest Piano Duo (Anna and Dmitri Shelest) alongside the Brandywine Symphony Orchestra from the greater Philadelphia region.
The title of the piano concerto alone tells a story. Steel evokes Azovstal, the vast steelworks in Mariupol that became a place of extraordinary resistance during the siege of the city in 2022, and with it the endurance and heroism of its defenders. Violet comes from the final poem of Ukrainian poet and soldier Maksym Kryvtsov, killed in action in 2024. And Rage needs little explanation.
But this is not a concert about the war. It is Ukrainian contemporary music, including a piece by the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov, performed alongside works by the legendary American composers Philip Glass and Samuel Barber.
By design, UCF is a rare opportunity to bring extraordinary Ukrainian talent to New York as artists whose work belongs in the city’s cultural life, without reducing it to the current devastation of war. This is one of the reasons we’re proud to work tirelessly on the festival each year and see it receive the recognition it deserves.
Over three weeks, starting October 18 through November 6, audiences will encounter Ukrainian cinema, literature, theater, and classical music performances. We are partnering with established cultural institutions such as QUAD Cinema, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, The Public Theater, Teatro LATEA, the New York Public Library, Poets House and more.
For us, this expansion in partnerships and locations is one of the most exhilarating parts. It proves the point: Ukrainian art should not exist only in Ukrainian spaces as it belongs in the wider cultural landscape of New York.
Stories On Stage
One of the performances we’re particularly looking forward to is The Reckoning: Selected Scenes and Conversation by Dash Arts, a New York preview of verbatim theater based on verified survivor testimony from russia’s war in Ukraine.
It tells the story of one man who remained in his village outside Kyiv when others fled. The performance will be followed by a conversation between London-based director Josephine Burton and Peter Pomerantsev, co-founder of The Reckoning Project, about the testimony behind the work and the documentation of war crimes.
Our festival becomes the springboard for further exploration and workshopping of this piece ahead of its US tour in 2027. Praised as “powerful and important” and “brilliant, sharp stage craft” in the UK, the production comes to UCF with US-based Ukrainian actors Petro Ninovskyi and Sasha Odesa.
At the festival, we not only bring Ukrainian artists’ work to New York, but also showcase American talent working on Ukrainian stories. Playwright Richard Nelson’s new play, More Beauty Than Sorrow, created in Kyiv, looks at Lesia Ukrainka and her family through their everyday lives rather than through the usual monumental portrait of a national literary figure. The festivalgoers will be able to see the production that was created in Ukraine in a film screening at The Public Theater.
A Full Circle
This year, the festival closes where it started – with a return to Carnegie Hall with Unbreakable Harmony, bringing together the Kyiv Lysenko State Music Lyceum Chamber Girls’ Choir and the Westchester Children’s Chorus.
They will perform Ukrainian and American music, songs about peace and community, and, finally, Shchedryk – the Ukrainian melody better known in the US as Carol of the Bells.
This carries a specific meaning: Shchedryk was first performed for American audiences at Carnegie Hall in 1921. More than a century later, Ukrainian children will sing it there again.
Artists need audiences and culture survives by staying alive in people’s minds and hearts.
Artists need not only donations and support, but also the chance to connect and be together in a room with audiences during these very challenging times.
You may come because you want to support Ukraine, but you may leave having discovered a composer, actor, filmmaker, or story you knew nothing about.
And that is the beauty of something we can’t live without: culture. And this year, we have some spectacular moments of Ukrainian culture to witness together.
We hope you’ll join us.
Rachel Shuey and Viktorija Mickute, UCF Producers