Anastassiya Kolesnichenko is a linguist from Kazakhstan whose research focuses on language documentation, descriptive linguistics, and under-described minority languages. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Chinese Language from Nanjing University, China (2020), where she was awarded the Nanjing Municipal Government Scholarship, and a Master’s degree in Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics from Université Paris Cité (2025), supported by the Smarts-UP Excellence Scholarship. During her Master’s studies, Anastassiya produced the first—and currently only—descriptive grammar of Tshodrug Tibetan, a severely under-documented language spoken by approximately 1,500 speakers in Yunnan Province, China.

Her research combined in situ fieldwork with urban and remote methodologies, enabling a comprehensive phonetic and morphosyntactic analysis of the language. She compiled a lexicon of approximately 1,000 entries and fully annotated a corpus of nine narratives, including traditional stories, accounts of community practices, and elicited materials based on visual stimuli. Since March 2026, Anastassiya has been a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the Australian National University, supported by the HDR Fee Merit Scholarship and the University Research Scholarship. Her doctoral research focuses on the documentation of Barapasi, an undescribed Papuan language spoken in Indonesian Papua. Fluent in Russian, Kazakh, English, Chinese, and French, Anastassiya complements her academic research with over a decade of professional experience in language teaching, translation, interpretation, and editorial work.