Olga K. Pastuchiv is a noted author, artist and illustrator. Her family moved to West Babylon in 1956. At an early age, Olga enjoyed reading, writing and illustrating her stories. She was very positively influenced by two English teachers at West Babylon Senior High School, Miss Vederosa and Mr. Engeldrum and by three Mathematics teachers, Mr. Mercandetti, who taught Algebra; Mr. Pyle who taught Geometry and Mr. Smith, who taught Advanced Math. Olga sang in the high school chorus “and by the kindness of Mr. Alessi, occasionally accompanied the chorus on the piano.” Her guidance counselor, Mr. McCarthy, was instrumental in her applying and receiving a full academic scholarship to prestigious Vassar College, where she majored in Russian Language. After graduating from Vassar, Olga studied Art at the Massachusetts College of Art but is in many ways a self-taught artist.

Olga Pastuchiv’s “colorful and imaginative” art is “primarily in woodcut, acrylics and oils.” Her subject matter “is often water-related, including water lilies, birds and fish, and the tricks and moods of light.” Her art work has been exhibited and positively received in art galleries in Maine and at Harvard and Cornell and many other venues in the U.S., and Europe, such as in the Ukraine, Crete and Greece.

She wrote and illustrated the highly regarded Minas and the Fish children’s book. Olga was inspired to write Minas and the Fish “by a little boy I met while working one summer hauling nets on a fishing boat in Lefkos, on Karpathos Island in Greece.” She has illustrated Riparia’s River, which was written by Michael J. Caduto; An Illustrated Flora of the Boston Harbor Islands by Dale Levy; Fe-Lines by Norman Shapiro and Fables in a Modern Key by Pierre Coran and Fables in a Modern Key, English translations by Norman R. Shapiro.

A musician, Olga Pastuchiv, has taught the bandura, “a complicated 54-string traditional Ukrainian musical instrument” at Harvard University and other locations.