Larysa Efimovna Shepitko (6 January 1938, Artemivsk, Ukrainian SSR – 2 June 1979, Kalinin Oblast) was a Ukrainian Soviet film director. She went to the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow as a student of Olexander Dovzhenko. She was a student of Dovzhenko's for 18 months until he died in 1956. Shepitko graduated from VGIK in 1963 with her prize winning diploma film Heat, made when she was 22 years old. It tells the story of a new farming community in Central Asia during the mid 1950s.