Oksana Mysina is one of Russia's most accomplished actors. Splitting her time between work on stage and on screen, she has performed on Off-Broadway, Avignon, Brazil and in 20 other countries, and has appeared in over 40 films with many of Russia's top directors. She was the leader of her own rock band, Oxy Rocks, whose music usually finds its way into her films. She has won numerous cinema awards, including the Golden Ram Debut Award for her performance in Vadim Abdrashitov's Play for a Passenger. Her performance of Empress Maria in Vitaly Melnikov's Poor, Poor Pavel was nominated for a Nika, the so-called Russian Oscar. Mysina debuted as a film director in 2020 with Obizhennye. Belarus(sia) [Insulted. Belarus(sia)], a full-length political film based on the play by Andrei Kureichik. It premiered in Russia on TV Rain on November 15, 2020, and was named Best Experimental film at the Art Film Awards festival in North Macedonia in 2021. A follow-up to that film, Voices of the New Belarus, also scripted by Kureichik, was made in 2021. Oksana has made two award-winning shorts, Red, Blue and Asya, and Ivan Petrovich. She currently lives in Greece, where she is in the post-production stage with a semi-documentary, On the Road to Antigone, and a feature film, Woman and Angel, with Greek casts. Work on two more films, Napoleon, based on a script by the poet Viktor Korkiya, and Cherry: War, is ongoing. Mysina edits her own films, and is her own post-production team.
Oksana was born in the Donbas region of Ukraine and lived there for the first eight years of her life. She became active in the anti-war movement in Russia as soon as Russia began efforts to annex large territories of Ukrainian land in 2014. She has worked alongside such Russian opposition figures as Boris Nemtsov, Alexei Navalny, and Ilya Yashin, the latter of whom she cast in her film Voices of the New Belarus. For her efforts, Mysina saw her work as a film and theater actor marginalized. Seeing nothing but danger signs ahead, she left Russia with her husband John Freedman in 2018, settling on the island of Crete in Greece. It was here that Oksana reimagined herself as a film director. Including works now in production, she has ten films to her credit.