Age: 24
Education: Kyiv National Economic University
Profession: Deputy chief operating officer at Genesis, one of the largest IT companies in Ukraine
Did you know? He began ballroom dancing when he was 4.
Artyom Kopanev began ballroom dancing when he was 4 because “girls needed partners” in his kindergarten. Little did he know that ballroom dancing would become such a big part of his life for the 20 next years.
At 17, Kopanev started developing a dancing program to help people with Parkinson’s disease, a brain disorder that leads to shaking, stiffness, and difficulty with walking, balance, and coordination.
He started working on it accidentally — a friend of his, a prominent specialists in treating the disease in the eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, where Kopanev is from, asked to help her. She heard about a program in England of a dance therapy to fight Parkinson’s and thought that Kopanev and she could do the same.
“She said she knew I was engaged in ballroom choreography and Latin dancing. That’s how it began,” Kopanev said.
Parkinson’s degenerative symptoms usually unfold gradually and get worse over time, but dancing helps patients to get some of their coordination back. “Patients felt better and enjoyed dance therapy so we decided to continue as people started to move faster, had better balance and felt happier,” Kopanev said.
The program was a success, but in 2014, Russia started its war in eastern Ukraine, and Kopanev had to start his life over in Kyiv on his own. “It was quite hard to settle in Kyiv because I was only 18 years old, and alone,” he said.
He was working a low-paid job, teaching children how to dance at summer camps and applying for any others jobs he thought he could do. “I needed money to start a new life,” he said.
The new life led him to become a deputy chief operating officer at tech firm Genesis, a senior executive tasked with overseeing the day-to- day administrative and operational functions of one of the largest IT companies in Ukraine. Passion is key, he says.
“A team leader only focused on results cannot hire the best talent, if you don’t have passion to develop people’s talent, they will not work with you for long,” he says.
He got this job thanks to mathematics and logic skills, he said. He developed these skills through an internship at Ernst & Young in transaction adviser services.
“I understood that was the field where I could use my skills in the best way,” he said, “which also allowed me to continue the dancing program.”
He found out that his friend moved to Kyiv too. She contacted him from an institute of gerontology where she was studying Parkinson’s disease patients and wanted to replicate the same program. Kopanev agreed.
Being an executive and a volunteer is complementary, Kopanev said. “When you are volunteering, people are happy to see you, even when you’re not efficient. It’s not about money — they’re just happy you exist and this program is there,” he said.
“At the end, it is about getting the right things (in life) done.”
