When our planner suggested hiring a “holistic nurse from the former Soviet Union” to host our wedding, we laughed. Then we watched three of Valentina’s YouTube videos and immediately knew—this woman was the One. Both my husband and I have relatives that act and sound like her, the joke was taken well by the mixed crowd of Former-Soviet-Americans. Her ceremony speech started with, ‘Marriage is like winter in Lviv—long, difficult, and only survivable with vodka and patience.’ We expected her to be intense. What we didn’t expect was how strangely moving, funny, and deeply real she was. People were crying and belly-laughing at the same time. She passed around homemade sunflower seeds, blessed us in Ukrainian and had my dad dancing to an old Soviet love song by the end of the night. Everyone had an amazing time!

I hired Valentina to host my friend’s 40th birthday party because I didn’t want some fake-hype emcee or cheesy games. I wanted honesty, confusion, chaos, and some emotional stir up. Valentina delivered all of that and then some. People were howling with laughter. My ex came, cried, and said she’d never felt more seen. Valentina ended the night with a ‘diagnosis dance’ where she gave people fake medical diagnoses based on their dance styles. It was unhinged. My friends are still talking about it. Valentina is a true experience. She made my friend’s 40th unforgettable and just the right amount of bizarre.

When we first hired Valentina to host our company’s Wellness Day, we honestly didn’t know what to expect. We’re a hybrid startup with a lot of international employees—many of whom are from Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Latvia... Within minutes, she had the whole office’s attention—no slides, no PowerPoint, just pure presence. For our post-Soviet employees, she felt like home. For everyone else, she was unlike anything they’d ever seen. She made us feel connected, not just to each other, but to the parts of ourselves we usually leave out of the workplace. We brought her in to shake things up, and she did, but she also lifted people’s spirits in a way that felt strangely ancestral.