OUR TEAM
Hannah tries out a pair of authentic pince-nez glasses in Acting II class (DRAMA 231) at MiraCosta College, Oceanside, California, February 26, 2025. Photo: Philip Boland.
HANNAH MIYAMOTO
Creator, Screenwriter, and Producer
Hannah Miyamoto, J.D., M.A., M.S., is a retired attorney with master’s degrees in Women’s Studies and Sociology. Starting in graduate school, she has worked in theater and film for over 20 years. This August, Hannah will enter California State University-Northridge to earn an M.A. in Entertainment Industry Management.
Hannah started developing Ticket to Kyiv the day after Election Day in 2024. Her screenplay demonstrates her decades of experience working as an advocate, deploying both reason and inspiration to persuade Americans to support Ukraine’s right to sovereignty, territorial integrity, and peace.
Hannah grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and earned her B.S. in Civil Engineering (1986), her Juris Doctorate degree (1992), her B.A. (2003) and her M.S. (2005) in Women’s Studies at universities in Minnesota and Wisconsin. She earned her M.A. in Sociology (2012) while pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Over those seven years she assisted the last research projects of Dr. Milton Diamond (1934-2024), an expert on intersexed development and transgenderism known world-wide.
Born and raised as a boy, in 1996, physicians diagnosed that Hannah has Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (PAIS), a condition of intersexed development. Upon realizing that she could never succeed as a man, she began living as woman in 1997, adopting the maiden name of her now-late mother, Kazuko Miyamoto (1930-2021). Since writing her first play, Twelve Nights with Viola & Olivia (2005), a drama based on Shakespeare’s gender-focused classic Twelfth Night, many of Hannah’s works have included intersexed characters.
After moving to California to care for her late mother, Hannah earned A.A. degrees in Business Administration and Accounting at MiraCosta College in 2023, and she will leave MiraCosta College in 2025 with an A.A. in Film, Television and Electronic Media, and a certificate of achievement in Video and Media Design.
Hannah has experience as a playwright, screenwriter, novelist, actor, director, producer, cinematographer, editor, sound designer, VFX creator, animator, costume designer, lighting designer, and graphic artist. Complete details on Hannah’s career in theatre and film production is on a special section of this website.
POLINA URA HERMAN
Producer
Polina Herman (Bushynska) is a film producer, founder and owner of the companies UP UA Studio and UP USA Studio. She is a member of the Producers Guild of America, Television Academy, the European and Ukrainian Film Academies, the National Union of Cinematographers of Ukraine, Film Independent, the European Association of Psychodrama, the Institute of Psychodrama, and the International Documentary Association (IDA).
Polina graduated from the Kyiv Institute of Culture and Arts in 2011 with a degree in Marketing and Public Relations, and the Kyiv National Theater, Cinema, and Television University, I. Karpenko-Kary with a degree in Cinema and Television Production.
Polina founded the UP UA Studio production company in 2016, which has since produced many feature-length and short films and other productions, both before and after the all-out war Russia began against Ukraine in 2022. When the war began, Polina moved to Los Angeles, while UP UA Studio continues to function in both countries.
For more details on Polina’s work, see: upua.com.ua/dt_team/polina-herman-bushinskaya/ The UP UA Studio website is https://upua.com.ua/
CRYSTAL RIVERS
Actor and Producer
Crystal in a photo she describes as an “adulting” image.
Crystal Rivers is a member of SAG-AFTRA, an award-winning screenwriter, and co-producer of Ticket to Kyiv. She will play the role of “Andrea Weiss,” the mother of the protagonist Rachel Weiss.
A former dancer and competitive gymnast, Crystal is now a leading advocate for making acting and other roles in filmmaking more accessible to people with disabilities. Her goal is equitable participation by people with disabilities (25% of the population) in film and television productions.
Crystal’s acting career stretches back over 20 years, she has directed shorts and one feature. She now appears on American television shows and has been in one film shot in Poland.