You're reading: Ukrainian-born artist wins competition to design Starbucks’ holiday cup

There’s going to be a little Ukrainian flavor to Starbucks’ holiday cups this year.

Ukrainian-born Anna Bucciarelli, née Shinlova, whose family emigrated from Ukraine to Canada in 1997, was one of 13 winners of a competition run by the coffee retailer challenging customers to design this year’s seasonal cups.

Her design, which is based on Ukrainian Petrykivka-style folk art, will be seen on Starbucks holiday cups that will be served in more than 25,000 Starbucks stores, in 75 countries.

Bucciarelli, 35, works as a hospital manager in Toronto and paints in her free time.

“I was in the office at the time (when I found out) and I screamed and climbed on my desk,” Bucciarelli told the Kyiv Post.

“It’s just magical, such a great experience.”

Bucciarelli’s design, picked out in white on a red background, features a snowy village with small houses, a Christmas tree, and Santa on a sleigh pulled by reindeer. It also includes lots of decorative elements in the forms of plants, stars, and snowflakes around the Starbucks logo, and the inscription “Love and Joy”, near the cup rim.

Bucciarelli, born and raised in Kyiv, was trained from the age of 10 to 12 in Petrykivka-style art, which inspired the design for the Starbucks holiday cup.

She said that while she wanted to make the design for the cup universally appealing, using classic elements like snow, nature, little houses and reindeer, she also wanted to give a nod to her heritage, a very important part of her life:

“This is my interpretation of what Petrykivka would look like on a modern cup. While it is not pure Petrykivka, it has the elements of it: flowers and abstract elements like little feathers.”

Petrykivka-style art (named after the village of Petrykivka in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast) has always played a big part in the life of the artist, who even sold her artwork on Andriivsky Uzviz (Kyiv’s top souvenir spot) during her adolescence. One of Bucciarelli’s latest traditional Ukrainian artworks is a Petrykivka-style street art painting in central Toronto, created in August 2016.

Curiously enough, Bucciarelli didn’t tell many people about her passion for art up until two years ago, when her husband suggested she create a website to feature her work.

She has since been discovered by many clients, including the government of Canada, which asking her to design a CAD 10 Silver Coin called the “Celebration of Love.”

The artist, currently in New York for the launch event of the cup, said it was very important for her that she could represent Ukraine and its culture in her design.

“I was so pleased that Starbucks let me talk about my heritage and what inspired the design of the cup,” Bucciarelli said.

Last year’s Starbucks’ plain red holiday cup design – left blank intentionally so that the public could doodle their own designs on them, and if they wished submit them for this year’s competition – upset some religious people, who took the absence of the traditional Christmas symbols as a swipe at Christianity.