Yana Kovalkov was born and raised in Siberia, Russia. She earned a Master’s degree in Civil Law in 2012 from National Research Tomsk State University, Novosibirsk Law Institute. Shortly after, she worked as a police officer for three years. During this time, she also nurtured her passion for photography, taking courses at Photoschool 717.
In 2013 she began a black and white photographic project documenting A Day in the Life of the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre, capturing the daily scenes that unfolded around the historic building. That same year she began working as a freelance wedding photographer for two years.
A brief move to the UK in 2015 led her to Azo Equipment, a small family-run backpack workshop. There, she collaborated with a team of craftspeople on product development, hands-on assembly, marketing, and promotional photography.
Two years later, she relocated to the Czech Republic and joined a five-person startup team at Leadspicker, where she took on diverse roles including project management, design support, and sales.
By 2019, she settled in San Francisco, California, to pursue a Master’s degree in Project Management at Golden Gate University. She later joined the tech unicorn Sentry as a design project manager. After a break from photography, she returned to black-and-white street photography, picking up where she originally started. This led to Monochrome, an ongoing series exploring human interaction with the urban landscape through light, shadows, geometry, and proportion — often set against a backdrop of rain and fog.
Her next body of work, Aloha, shifted focus from urban street life to the coastlines of Kauai, Hawai‘i. Rooted in street photography, the series captures candid moments of daily joy and ritual along the shore. In 2023, Aloha was awarded Best Documentary Project in the Black and White category by the Paris International Photo Awards.
Most recently, in 2025, she began working on The Mission Statement, a street photography project focused on the culture of San Francisco’s Mission District. That same year, she was admitted to the International Center of Photography (ICP) to study Documentary Visual Storytelling.
