Maya Kopitseva

Maya Kuzminichna Kopitseva (born Gagry, Abkhazia, 18 May 1924; died Saint Petersburg, 6 June 2005) was a Soviet and Russian still-life painter and one of the leading representatives of the Leningrad school of painting. She lived and worked in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, throughout her career.

She was born in Gagry, in Abkhazia, within the USSR. In 1951 she graduated from the Ilya Repin Institute in the workshop of Boris Ioganson; her other teachers included Boris Fogel, Leonid Ovsiannikov and Alexander Zaytsev. The same year she joined the Saint Petersburg Union of Artists, then the Leningrad branch of the Union of Artists of the Russian Federation. From then on she regularly exhibited still lifes, portraits, genre scenes and sketches made from life.

In 2001 she was awarded the honorary title of Honored Artist of the Russian Federation. She was married to the painter and art educator Anatoli Levitin, a People's Artist of the USSR. Her paintings are held by the Russian Museum and by public and private collections in Russia, Italy, the United States, Japan, China, France and elsewhere.