Konstantin Akinsha is an art historian, curator and cultural journalist. He studied at the Shevchenko Art School in Kyiv, Ukraine, obtaining a Masters in Art History from the Moscow State University and receiving his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2013. Previously curator at the Kyiv Museum of Western and Oriental Art, Kyiv, Ukraine, between 1999-2000 he was Deputy Research Director with the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States. In 2007 he became a Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University and is a contributing editor and European correspondent, in Moscow and Budapest, for ARTnews magazine.

Mr Akinsha has won many journalistic awards such as the Clarion Award for Cultural Journalism (2009), the Society of Silurians Excellence in Journalism Award (2009). Most recently in April he curated an exhibition in the Künstlerhaus Wien in Vienna, displaying art from the original protests in Kiev’s Maidan Square