Nataliya Tchermalykh is a visual anthropologist and socio-legal scholar whose work examines the intersections of art, politics, and law in contexts of conflict, social transformation, and contested sovereignty, with a long-term focus on postsoviet societies and Ukraine. Trained in anthropology and sociology, she combines ethnographic research with visual analysis to explore how artistic practices, images, and material landscapes participate in political struggles, and forms of dissent. Her research addresses questions of iconoclasm, visual politics, performative protest, and the social life of law, with particular attention to how artists and activists make social and political change perceptible.
Her scholarship has appeared in leading journals and edited volumes in anthropology and visual studies, including Social Anthropology, Visual Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Gradhiva, Religion and Gender, and Anthropology and Action. She is the author of Paysages instables: Des artistes ukrainiens entre révolution et guerre (Rodovid/Pangée), with an English and Ukrainian edition forthcoming, and is currently completing the monograph Shifting Landscapes: An Anthropology of Art and War (under contract with Toronto University Press). She is also the editor of Subversive Intrusions: How Activist Interventions Redefine the Museum, which examines activist and artistic interventions in Western museum institutions.
Nataliya is the recipient of the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant for her project ICONS: Exploring Global Iconoclastic Politics in the 21st Century (2026-2031), one of the most competitive funding schemes for early- to mid-career researchers in Europe. Her work has been supported by additional fellowships and grants, including the SNSF Doc.Mobility Fellowship and the SNSF Spark Grant. She has held research appointments at institutions such as Sciences Po (Médialab) in Paris, and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Children’s Rights Studies (University of Geneva), and has conducted extensive fieldwork in Ukraine, Russia, Greece, and France.
Alongside her research, Nataliya is an experienced university teacher, having designed and taught courses such as Art in Society: An Anthropological Inquiry, Visualizing International Relations, and Making Politics, Making Art: Exhibiting International Relations at the Geneva Graduate Institute and the Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD). Her teaching integrates visual materials, ethnographic methods, and critical theory, and she has supervised numerous master’s theses at the intersection of law, culture, and politics.
Beyond academia, she is actively engaged in public scholarship on Ukraine, contributing to media, public debates, policy briefs, and open-access platforms. She is also a co-founder of Comité Ukraine–Genève and has been involved in refugee advocacy in Switzerland.
Nataliya holds a PhD in Anthropology and Sociology from the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (under the supervision of Prof. Grégoire Mallard), an MA and BA in Oriental Studies and Literature from Kyiv National University. She works in Ukrainian, Russian, French, English, and Japanese, and lives and works in Geneva.