Sistra contributor
Michelle Yastremsky
Founder and Editor of Sistra
Global
Michelle Yastremsky is an editorial strategist, writer and founder of Sistra, a platform dedicated to women-led businesses, cultural projects and social enterprises around the world.
Her work is shaped by years of travel, a growing focus on responsible tourism, and a fascination with the ways women pass knowledge, skills and opportunity forward.
Sistra grew from that thread: making meaningful women-led work more visible, easier to understand and easier to support.
Profile
Her story
Michelle grew up between cultures, languages and generations.
A native Russian speaker born to parents from Kyiv, she learned early that identity is rarely one fixed thing. It is inherited and adapted, translated and reinterpreted, shaped by what we carry with us and what changes as we move through the world.
That instinct to translate and connect followed her into both her career and her travels.
Professionally, Michelle spent more than 15 years working across editorial strategy, writing and brand storytelling. Outside of work, she spent more than a decade traveling and living abroad, often seeking out experiences that brought her closer to the people behind a place rather than simply its landmarks.
Over time, she began noticing the same pattern again and again.
Women were teaching one another how to weave, print, dye, cook, lead tours, build businesses and preserve traditions. Skills moved between mothers and daughters, elders and younger women, neighbors, coworkers and friends. Knowledge was not only being preserved, but adapted and used to create income, confidence and opportunity.
What stayed with Michelle was not simply the work itself, but the network around it.
A craft could carry generations of knowledge. A workshop could become a livelihood. A cooperative could give women more economic independence. A community tourism project could create a reason for younger generations to stay connected to a place and its traditions.
There was a kind of thread running through all of it: women passing something forward.
At the same time, travel was changing the way Michelle thought about her own role as a visitor.
She became more interested in who benefits from tourism, whose stories get told, who owns the businesses travelers support and what responsibility comes with the freedom to move through other people’s homes and communities.
Those two ideas, women carrying knowledge forward and travelers learning to move with more awareness, gradually came together.
Sistra grew from that connection.
It became a way to make women-led work easier to discover, while also giving people more context about the women behind it, the knowledge they carry and the communities their work supports.
The name itself comes from sestra, “sister” in both Russian and Ukrainian, a nod to Michelle’s own relationship to language, heritage and the idea that what we inherit can keep evolving as it is passed forward.
“What stayed with me wasn’t only the beauty … but the power of women creating together.”
Portfolio
Selected work
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A closer look
What gets passed on
Michelle has long been interested in the things that survive because someone chooses to keep carrying them forward: a language, a recipe, a craft technique, a story, a way of working or a relationship to place.
Travel made that visible in unexpected ways.
Again and again, she found women at the center of that exchange: teaching younger generations, sharing skills with one another, keeping traditions alive while finding new ways to make them economically viable.
A textile could hold generations of knowledge. A workshop could become both cultural preservation and livelihood. A cooperative could create income while keeping a community connected to its own traditions.
Those connections became central to the way Michelle understands women’s empowerment.
Not as an abstract idea, but as something practical and relational: access to skills, income, knowledge, confidence, community and the ability to pass those things forward.
That same lens eventually became central to Sistra.
Watch / Listen
How Can Digital Nomads Revitalize Rural Italian Villages
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Looking ahead
What she’s building toward
Through Sistra, Michelle is building a living map of women shaping culture, community and place around the world.
At the heart of it is the idea that women-led work rarely exists in isolation. A business can support a family. A cooperative can preserve a tradition. A woman who learns a skill can teach it to someone else. Knowledge moves outward.
Sistra is designed to make those connections more visible.
It is also part of Michelle’s broader interest in responsible travel: helping people discover places through the women shaping them, understand the context behind what they are experiencing and make choices that keep more value within local communities.
Over time, that work will extend beyond editorial stories into conversations, collaborations and journeys built around learning directly from the women already doing the work.
At the center of it is a simple idea: what women know, create and build becomes more powerful when it can keep moving forward.
Recognition
Highlights
Speaking · Nomada Festival · 2026
How Can we Be Better Guests in the Places We Move Through?
Award · Better Guest · 2028
Winner of xyz
Her Sistra finds
Projects, people and places she thinks are worth knowing.
Connect
Work with Michelle
collaboration introduction
Expertise
Marketing, branding, editorial strtegy, CMS design, responsoble tourism
Open to
Marketing, Web
Follow the thread
Meet more of the women behind the work.
