BA (Hons) English and German, St. Petersburg State University

I received my degree in English and German from St. Petersburg State University in Russia and briefly taught English there after graduation. I was Head of Russian at the Stephen Perse Foundation (an independent secondary school and 6th-form college in Cambridge) for 18 years, designing and teaching Russian GCSE, A-level and IB courses, and also worked for the Slavonic Section at the University of Cambridge, where I taught Grammar and Introduction to Russian to first-year students and provided oral practice classes and language support sessions. I have strong personal interests in history, folklore and art, and this comes through in everything I do as a language teacher. I love creating and delivering courses that incorporate a lot of target language culture and as much authentic and up-to-date material as possible, because I believe that language learning should be a path to cultural understanding and an exploration of different worldviews. 

I was born and grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, but have been living in the UK since 2001. I moved to Wales with my husband and children in 2023. I love being outdoors, reading, creative writing, crafting and learning languages as a hobby. I have been learning Ukrainian for a few years and am now starting to learn Welsh.