She holds degrees in Contemporary History from Université Paris 1 (Ph.D.), and in Photography from the National School of Photography (Arles, France). She now lives and works in Montreal (Canada) where she moved in 2005. She is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQÀM). As a photographer, since the mid-1990s, she has been developing a practice halfway between documentary and poetic essay. Her work embodies her interest in the traces of the past (particularly from the last century) in the present, especially in invisible people, places, and things that have been forgotten, and even erased from memories.

A historian and photographer by training, Érika is currently working on a book project on the history of her paternal grandmother, who was born in 1921 in Chernihiv Oblast. This book combines text, archive images and photographs, to reconstruct the little-documented life of her grandmother who faced Stalinism in her youth, forced labour in Germany during the World War II, and ended her life in France, far away from her hometown, in 1998.

During her residency at the Center for Urban History, she will be researching the photographic collections and the historic Lychakivsky cemetery. Cemeteries are important sources of knowledge for understanding the complex history of places such as the city of Lviv. As well as being the burial place of the dead, cemeteries have a unique cultural value that says a lot about the past identity of a city.