THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Before she turned herself into a bomb, Aminat Saprykina was a professional actress and dancer in Dagestan. At the peak of her theatrical career, she performed the lead role of a charming witch, Olesya, in Alexander Kuprin’s Forest Witches. Fellow actors remember her as a joyful girl and a graceful break-dancer. A video from that period of her life features the future mass murderer dressed in a sexy black skirt, swirling in a dance. But after her conversion to Islam, Saprykina took another name: Kurbanova. And it was with this name that she became at least the 42nd female suicide bomber in the last decade in Russia.

Nemtsova/Pulitzer