Olga Balai | Local on-site Group, Novogrudok/Belarus

Olga has a passion for capturing life, people, travel and history both as an illustrator and a guide. For more than 10 years Olga has been an interpreter at Jewish Holocaust conferences and a guide through Jewish Minsk. She worked as an interpreter for Peter Duffy during his research for ‘The Bielski Brothers’ book and BBC2 filming  a partisans’ story in Belarus.

Being a member of Urban Sketchers Minsk Olga also provides live, real-time sketch reports of events, meetings, and experiences in venues across Belarus. For several years she has been producing event reports and illustrations for Tut.by news agency and different magazines.

Sketching the Bielskis

The memory can be saved in different forms. Visual form is one of the easiest ways to perceive information and to turn it into a long-lasting memory.

Being a passionate sketcher first as a hobby Olga then turned it into a profession of event sketcher and bumped into an unexpected effect. Even after many years since the sketch has been made it helps to recollect the moment clearly, including emotions, the words said, sounds, smells. Combine it with information and one can receive a powerful instrument for making it a personal experience.

As a member of the project Olga is going to create a series of live sketches depicting the participants in the process of their discovery of the Bielski brothers story.

See Olga's sketches created in the Naliboki forest during our first on-site meeting in Belarus (8-14 August 2021): VIDEO