About The Founder

Alina Kisina is a photographer, artist, curator, advocate for creativity, mentor and speaker.

Her work is a search for harmony in chaos through those universal, timeless human qualities that reach beyond location, gender and social background. Alina’s photography has been published and exhibited around the world and she is the photographer for a number of prominent arts and culture festivals.

The Story Behind Children of Vision

This story began back in 2003, when Alina volunteered for the Kyiv Special School of Art for children with impaired vision. 

“Many of these children were facing significant social challenges as well as physical disability, however they embodied resilience, can-do attitude and tremendous creativity. We spent 8 weeks together as I volunteered for them on their trip to Austria and every day they continued to impress me with their ability and beautiful self-expression through music and art. They certainly taught me a thing or two about transcendence and overcoming difficulty and I could never forget this experience.” 

In 2016 with the support of the Arts Council England, Alina went back to the Kyiv Special School of Art and began photographing the children. Observing how creativity can be used in extraordinary ways to overcome challenges, she created her photography series Children of Vision, which later inspired and gave its name to this platform for young people from all over the world.

“For all these years I kept in touch with the school and they have remained a part of my life. We have all been dealt certain cards in life and are facing our unique challenges. These children continue to be an example to me of how to do it elegantly, with dignity and grace. 

I was in awe of their ability to dive into a creative process and fully lose - or find - themselves and their unique strengths in it. As a photographer I wanted to capture their rich inner world through those moments of transcendence, when time stood still and everything else disappeared and their disability dissolved” 

Alina’s photography series caught the attention of the Charitable Foundation Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv, Ukraine, who exhibited it at the Arsenal of Ideas Festival in 2018.

“Simply showing an exhibition on its own didn’t feel complete, something was missing. Through my photography I was communicating the way I see the children, but something inside me wanted to turn it inside out and also show the way children, all children, see the world.”

So Alina invited young people from all over the world to contribute their images through Instagram, using #CoVtogether, to become part of her exhibition. She then encouraged the visitors to curate a live installation by choosing one of the submitted images that spoke to them and putting it up on the museum wall. This simple act of co-creating brought together people of all ages and abilities and was later replicated at the Children of Vision exhibition at the Diffusion International Photography Festival in Cardiff, Wales in 2019.

After the exhibitions Alina decided to continue the Instagram initiative and it grew into an independent online platform that continues to support and encourage creativity by young people. 

“I always believed in creativity as an enabling force, and photography lends itself to it beautifully. Working with the school in Kyiv made me aware of the importance of support systems that make profound change possible and I knew that Children of Vision wanted to carry on living and this was just the beginning.”

Children of Vision continues to receive submissions from 47 countries (so far!).