Larissa Zaleska Onyshkevych

As a Ukrainian drama specialist, she has edited/compiled 6 books on the subject. Her anthologies of modern Ukrainian drama were the first such compilations in Ukrainian literature, and include: an English-language anthology of Ukrainian drama, a set of parallel volumes of plays in the two languages, as well as the first study and anthology of Ukrainian drama written by playwrights of the Ukrainian Diaspora in the West. A major selection of her studies of Ukrainian drama is collected in her volume Tekst I Hra [Text and Performance: Essays on Ukrainian Drama], 2009. In this conpendium, her studies are grouped as Texts and Interpretations. Under “Texts” she discusses modernism, postmodernism, existentialism, issues of identity, and themes of historical upheavals as they are reflected in specific plays. In Section II, fourteen Ukrainian playwrights and their plays (written between 1895 and 2002) are discussed in comparative aspects to other Western dramatic works. Section III deals with the presentation of various Ukrainians plays in Ukrainian and American theaters, while concentrating on the interpretations chosen by specific directors. Other sections deal with non-Ukrainian plays on Ukrainian themes, and publications on the Ukrainian theater and actors.

She received many awards and grants (NDEA IV, IREX, ACLS, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar grant to teach in Ukraine. In 2001, she was granted an Honorary Doctorate by the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv; in 2015 she was awarded the Ivan Franko Medal by this university. Her book on Ukrainian Drama - Tekst I Hra- was the winner of the L. and P. Kovaliv Prize, in 2010.

In: A Hundred Years of Youth, A Bilingual Anthology of 20th Century Ukrainian Poetry, Olha Luchuk and Michael M. Naydan, eds. and compilers. Lviv: Litopys, 2000.

She graduated from Humberside Collegiate Institute in Toronto, and the Royal Canadian Conservatory of Music in Toronto; studied chemistry at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (grad. 1954), and then Slavic Studies at the University of Toronto (BA, with minors in Political Science and Anthropology, 1962). At the U. of Pennsylvania, she received an MA in Ukrainian language, and then a Ph.D. in Ukrainian literature (1973). She taught at Rutgers Univ. in New Brunswick, N.J., and later worked as an editor (Suchasnist and PRF Associates). She served as President of Princeton Research Forum and then President of the Shevchenko Scientific Society (USA)

Larissa Maria Lubov Zaleska Onyshkevych (born 12 May 1935) is a scholar of modern Ukrainian drama and literature. Most of her publications are on modern and postmodern Ukrainian drama, that she discusses in a comparative literature approach. Ukrainian poetry and prose, as well as issues of the Ukrainian language are also topics of her interest.

Larissa Zaleska was born in Stryi, Ukraine (1935 -). Her mother (Maria-Volodymyra Shankovska) was a teacher and painter, and father (Tadey Zalesky) was an educator, teaching Ukrainian and Latin in gymnasia and teachers colleges; he was a director of The Sambir Teachers College, and The Stryi Teachers College. In 1918 he was elected congressman of the Western Ukrainian National Republic (1918-1919).