The head is portrayed in a three-quarter profile and it features a simple ponytail at the back. Kozhina covered Ulanova’s eyes, eyebrows, hair and lips with colored glaze, however, the sculpture is white for the most part.

 
Galina Ulanova was the most highly awarded ballerina in Soviet ballet. She was awarded the title of the Hero of Socialist Labor twice, she also was a winner of state prizes and received four Orders of Lenin.

 
Ulanova was born on December 26, 1909, in St. Petersburg, in a family of ballet dancers, who worked in the Imperial Mariinsky Theater. When the girl was nine, she was accepted into the Petrograd Drama School (now known as Russian State Institute of Performing Arts), where she studied under her mother, Maria Romanova. Later, her teacher was Agrippina Vaganova. Galina Ulanova was accepted into the ballet company of the Leningrad Opera and Ballet Theater (now the Mariinsky Theater) in 1928.

A year later, Ulanova performed her first big role. She was Odette in Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake”. In the 1930s –1940s, she worked alongside the best ballet masters of the USSR. The roles of Giselle (“Giselle”), Maria (“The Fountain of Bakhchisarai”) and Juliet (“Romeo and Juliet”), performed by Galina Ulanova, became classic.

 
In 1944, the ballerina joined a ballet company in the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. She later confessed,

 
Galina Ulanova stopped performing officially in 1962. From 1960 until 1997, she worked as a ballet mistress at the Bolshoi Theater, preparing both men and women.

 
Galina Ulanova died on March 21, 1998. She was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. The ballerina’s relatives and friends established a fund named her. In 2004, the flat on Kotelnicheskaya Embankment became the Ulanova Memorial Museum.