Michelle Yastremsky

Michelle Yastremsky is a Ukrainian-American writer, strategist and founder of Sistra. She has spent more than a decade moving through the world, but the stories she carries with her are rarely about the places themselves. They're about the women she met there.

A group of women keeping generations of red-clay pottery alive in Oaxaca. A social enterprise in Thailand that changed the way she understood what travel could support. Women building livelihoods, preserving culture, creating art, feeding communities and passing knowledge from one generation to the next.

Some of these women Michelle met while traveling. Some she volunteered alongside. Others she found through friends, work, or by following one story until it led to another. Again and again, she found herself wanting to tell someone: you need to know about her.

That's the heart of Sistra.

Sistra grew from Michelle's belief that women's stories are worth seeking out, remembering and passing on, and that the way we experience a place changes when we know the people shaping it. It's a home for the women and projects that have stayed with her, and an invitation to keep finding more.

Her Sistra finds are deeply personal, sometimes unexpected and often connected to her own travels. She isn't interested in collecting places for the sake of collecting them. She's interested in the stories that make us care enough to look closer.