When Alla was a schoolgirl in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), her uncle, an avid collector of Leniniana, invited her to join him on a weekly flea market foray. Like many schoolchildren in the U.S.S.R. of the day, she was eager to collect postage stamps. Her uncle got her started on collecting stamps bearing reproductions of famous paintings. For a number of years, Alla saved her allowance to buy art-stamp sets: from the Hermitage and the Russian Museum, from Cuba and Bulgaria, from Prague and Mongolia. She often re-arranged them in her album by subject, composition, location, or period. When she and her family emigrated to New York in 1980, the stamp album was among the few things she brought along.
As most of her family worked in the medical profession, Alla entered the pre-med program at New York University, but after enrolling in the art history survey taught for the last time by the famed H.W. Janson, she found herself on a path to a different, yet seemingly predestined career. After getting a Ph.D. in art history, Alla moved to California and embraced her childhood passion for collecting and redacting artworks, becoming a museum curator. She had the knack for shaping a narrative from objects found in neglected coffers and for creating a game plan out of the chaos of artists' studios.
Alla first delved into the storerooms of the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive but, after a few years, she took up an opportunity that would truly test her mettle. Propelled by a sense of indebtedness to her Jewish family, she agreed to direct a fledgling museum possessing one of the world's most intriguing collections of Jewish art and culture thus ensuring that it would be permanently preserved. After ten years and the completion of a newly renovated building to house it, this had become the Magnes Collection at U.C. Berkeley, the first Jewish museum affiliated with a major university.
Alla’s experience of guaranteeing a lasting legacy for artists and collections often overlooked by history and the marketplace was to become the impetus for starting her own agency, KunstWorks, in 2014. Under the auspices of the latter, Alla assembled a team of art whizzes and veterans to honor and promote challenging, underrepresented, marginalized yet crucially important work by unconventional artists of the late 20th century. Thanks to KunstWorks artworks by, among others, brilliant older women, young men who had perished in the AIDS epidemic, and African-American quilters found homes in the major museums around the country.
Alla lives in Berkeley, CA, and Lisbon, Portugal, where she writes about art and occasionally thumbs through her childhood stamp album.