Evgenia Dovbysh
Buratino Productions (Buratino) is a New Zealand limited liability company formed in 2007 by business partners Evgenia Dovbysh and Wendy Riley. Buratino designs and develops language based educational and teaching resources, focusing on resources that promote learning through fun.
Evgenia Dovbysh is a native Russian speaker , Linguist and a language teacher with 20 years experience in teaching. She taught English as a second language in Russia, Russian to English speaking students (children and adults), and has been instrumental in setting up and running Russian language classes in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Wendy Riley
Wendy Riley is director and principal designer at design company Hot Pyjama Productions Ltd, specialising in designing and producing marketing communications. This company, which she co-founded in 1997, has been in business for over 10 years.
Wendy has been studying the Russian language under Evgenia’s teaching for five years, and her primary school aged daughter is also her pupil. Many of the resources that Wendy and Evgenia have designed and used so far have been tested on fellow students of all ages.
This shared interest in the Russian language has given rise to Buratino Productions. The directors have recognised the need for quality language resources – particularly those that encourage the use and retention of language in a fun way, such as board games, flashcards, activity books, online resources.
Evgenia’s and Wendy’s respective backgrounds in language education, teaching, design and business combine very well to create fun and useful products and services to fill a gap in the education market for quality teaching resources.