Daria Serenko

Daria Serenko (born in Khabarovsk in 1993) is a Russian poet, curator and public artist. She is known for her advocacy of women's and LGBT rights in contemporary Russia, and for her 2023 book Chicas e instituciones, which gives voice to women working at the lowest levels of the country's cultural sector.

She studied at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute and lived in Moscow, where she worked as a curator at the Moscow Municipal Library. She took part in the travelling anti-militarist exhibition Ne Mir (No Peace, 2015–16), and in 2016 she organised Tikhii Picket (Silent Picket), a project in which participants created A3 political posters and recorded the reactions they provoked. Serenko herself travelled with her own poster for months, talking to people for many hours a day. One poster showed a girl with her head in her arms, surrounded by comments directed at a woman who had reported a rape.

In 2020 she co-founded Femdacha, a feminist retreat on the outskirts of Moscow. In February 2021 she organised a chain of solidarity for women who had suffered political repression, which brought her hundreds of death threats. After a November 2021 Facebook post about migrant crime, her phone number and home address were reportedly leaked to far-right groups. In February 2022 she was sentenced to 15 days in jail over an Instagram post promoting tactical voting that included symbols of an organisation proscribed as extremist.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine she joined Feminist Anti-War Resistance and, in March 2022, was among 151 international feminists who signed the manifesto Feminist Resistance Against War. That same month she went into exile in Georgia, where she lives today. Her poetry includes Siberia Burns, published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her contribution to the anthology F Letter (ISOLARII, 2020). Her legacy lies in joining artistic practice with political protest, and she has become a prominent voice in Russian feminist debate and anti-war resistance.