Ira Bondarenko

Ira (Irina) Bondarenko is an emerging ceramic artist, and a native of Ukraine. Her ceramic work has been featured in over a dozen National and International Ceramic competitions, including the Michigan Ceramic Art Association Competition, the 24th San Angelo National Ceramic Competition, and the “Strictly Functional Pottery National Show.” In 2023 and 2025, she received grant awards from the University of Michigan Art Initiative. While following her passion for ceramics, she had a tenure at the University of Michigan Biostatistics Department, where she worked for over 20 years.

In her work, Ira seeks to understand how beauty and injury can coexist in a space and amplify each other. She is interested in endangered, vulnerable qualities of an object that speak not only of injury but also of resilience and beauty. Ira searches for ways to convey the tension brought by this duality and capture it by contrasting different materials, building large works as constellations of smaller forms, and pushing the fragility of ceramic surfaces to the limit.