Yelena Kalinsky comes to the Master’s Program in Counseling and Psychotherapy at ICSW after a career as an art historian and translator, most recently at Michigan State University. She earned her BA in art history from the University of Chicago and her PhD from Rutgers, the State University in New Jersey. Yelena spent a Fulbright year in Moscow researching and interviewing conceptual and performance artists who had worked in the Moscow underground art scene in the 1970s and 1980s and who became the subject of her dissertation. She is the editor and translator of Collective Actions: Audience Recollections from the First Five Years, 1976-1989 (Soberscove, 2012) and co-editor and co-translator of Andrei Monastyrski: Elementary Poetry (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019).

Yelena is originally from Ukraine and Belarus; her family settled in the US when she was a child. She is interested in working with gender expansive youth, immigrants and refugees, and other vulnerable populations in Chicago.