Biography
Stasya Tolstaya, also credited as Stasya Venkova or Anastasia Venkova, is a Russian actress, director and screenwriter. She was born Anastasiya Pavlovna Venkova on 19 December 1997 in Saint Petersburg and graduated from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in 2019, having studied in the workshop of Sergei Solovyov.
She began acting in 2013 and has appeared in films including The Blackout (2019), Klipmeykery (2022) and Navodneniye (2022). She plays Yulia in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur (2026). As a filmmaker she has directed and written shorts and features such as Taynoe vlechenie (2023) and Semeynoe schaste (2025). Her short film Cafe Midnight won Best Young Director at the Sarajevo Fashion Film Festival in 2017, and she received the Mosfilm Medal named after Sergei Eisenstein in 2020.
Tolstaya has also worked in theatre, including a role in Ivanov at the Vakhtangov Theatre in 2018. She married actor Ivan Tolstoy in 2023.
