Biography of Alina Pyazok
Alina Pyazok (also known professionally as Alina Pasok) is a Russian-born director, cinematographer, and co-founder of the punk-pop-rave band Little Big. She has directed over 100 music videos that have collectively garnered more than 3 billion views on YouTube, making her one of the most influential clipmakers to emerge from the Eastern European music scene. In 2019, Forbes included her in its “30 Under 30” list of the most promising young Russians.
Early Life and Childhood
Alina Vyacheslavovna Pyazok was born on July 6, 1990, in Chelyabinsk, a city in the Ural region of Russia. Her family history traces back to Tallinn — her grandmother, a leading oncologist, was sent to work in Chelyabinsk during the Soviet era. Her father, Vyacheslav Pyazok, is half Estonian, and the surname has Estonian roots. It originally sounded like “Pyaseke,” which translates to “swallow,” but was recorded differently at the passport office.
That misspelling followed her through school. Teachers often put the emphasis on the wrong syllable, and classmates teased her. “I remember the Christmas tree of excellent students in the 1st grade,” she recalled on the YouTube show “Tell Gordeeva.” “They call me to receive a gift and announce: ‘Pizok.’ I roared to the floor of the school and yelled: ‘I am Pyazok, remember, Pyazok!'”
She attended School No. 30 in Chelyabinsk and initially wanted to become a teacher, then a singer — though she never learned to sing. Until age 13, she didn’t have any serious hobbies. She started things and quickly quit, until she joined the leaders’ circle at the Palace of Pioneers, where she hosted children’s matinees, played the Snow Maiden, and later a rabbit in larger productions with multiple hosts running several Christmas trees a day.
As a teenager, Alina listened to Russian rock bands like Nautilus Pompilius, BI-2, and DDT, and watched MTV. She never imagined she’d end up behind a camera. That started by accident: she borrowed her operator’s camera while working at a local TV station, loved it so much she bought it off him, and started shooting everything she could.
At 15, she became a presenter on the Chelyabinsk TV channel Vostochny Express, brought in by a classmate. When she needed to produce a show about sports but knew nothing about the topic, she connected sports with the gopniks she saw around town — guys in tracksuits with striped pants. She filmed a segment about them, and it sparked heated debate among local youth.
Interviewing musicians for the channel, she met members of the bands Jane Air and Psyche. That’s when she realized she wanted to shoot musicians and their work.
Education
After finishing school, Alina bought two train tickets — one to Moscow, one to St. Petersburg — planning to apply to VGIK (the Russian State University of Cinematography) and the St. Petersburg State Institute of Cinema and Television. She missed admission to VGIK by one point and couldn’t afford paid tuition. At the St. Petersburg Institute, she was rejected outright. “They told me: ‘Go to your Chelyabinsk. You still won’t succeed,'” she later said.
Instead, she enrolled at the Union of Documentary Photographers under Yuri Galperin in St. Petersburg. Her coursework project was a video called “The Life of a Little Man.” She never got a formal director’s education — everything she learned came from doing the work.
Career
At 19, while on vacation in the Czech Republic, a friend asked Alina to shoot a pornographic video. She treated it as an adventure worth having for the memory. After that, she spent several years freelancing, shooting videos for Triagrutrika, Guf, Alai Oli, and Basta, before working with the YouTube creative association “Thank You, Eva!”
In 2013, she co-founded Little Big with Ilya “Ilyich” Prusikin. The band’s first members also included Anna Castellanos, Olympia Ivleva, and Jane Air musician Anton Lissov. Their debut video “Everyday I’m Drinking” was made on 30,000 rubles — the last money the group scraped together. It went viral, especially after a popular French blogger featured it. Members of the South African band Die Antwoord saw it and invited Little Big to open their show at St. Petersburg’s A2 club — despite the group not even having a full concert program yet.
Between 2013 and 2016, Alina and Ilya shot more than 10 videos for Little Big, including “Public Enemy” (2014), “Dead Unikorn” (2014), “Kind Inside, Hard Outside” (2015), and “Big Disk” (2016).
“It’s very cool when you grow with your team,” she told Petya Ploskov on his YouTube channel. “Neither I nor Ilya studied to be directors. We thought about how to do it right. We learned what accents are, how to place anchors in a video. I’m a cameraman. When shooting all the first clips, I carried the camera myself.”
One of her favorite videos is “Lollibomb” (2017), in which an actor resembling Kim Jong-un interacts with an atomic bomb. The idea came from Prusikin. In 2018, they released “Skibidi” — a viral dance video that has accumulated nearly 790 million views on YouTube and won the “Chart Dozen” award for Best Video in 2019.
From 2013 through 2025, Alina has directed 38 of Little Big’s 42 music videos, co-creating every one of them with Prusikin. “We always shoot all Little Big clips in tandem with Ilyich,” she says. “Together we create and create everything.”
Beyond Little Big, she has directed videos for Oliver Tree, Tommy Cash, Dillon Francis, Cody Ko, bbno$, Molchat Doma, Noize MC, Egor Kreed, Eldzhey, Feduk, and many others. She also directed shows for the KlikKlak YouTube channel, which at its peak entertained 7 million subscribers.
Her commercial clients have included Coca-Cola, Snickers, Crocs, Baileys, and William Lawson’s.
Eurovision and International Breakthrough
Little Big was selected to represent Russia at the Eurovision Song Contest 2020 with the song “Uno,” directed by Alina. The contest was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the music video went on to become the most-viewed video in the history of the Eurovision Song Contest’s YouTube channel, with over 200 million views. The band chose not to participate in the 2021 contest, giving another artist the opportunity.
In 2021, Little Big won the Muz-TV Award for Best Group, ahead of nominees including “Ruki Vverkh!” and Dabro.
In 2025, Alina returned to the Eurovision orbit when she directed the music video for Tommy Cash’s “Espresso Macchiato” — the song that won Eesti Laul 2025 and represented Estonia at Eurovision 2025 in Basel.
Anti-War Stance and Move to Los Angeles
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Alina and Little Big took a decisive public stand. On June 23, 2022, the band released “Generation Cancellation” — an anti-war music video directed by Alina and Ilya Prusikin. The video serves as a visual manifesto criticizing the war, Russian propaganda, and the political situation. Shortly after recording the song, the band left Russia and relocated to Los Angeles, California.
“We love our country, but we disagree so much with the war in Ukraine,” Prusikin stated at the time. Alina has maintained her base in Los Angeles since then, continuing to work with international artists.
Recent Work
Alina continues to direct at a prolific rate. Recent credits include videos for Little Big (“Boobs,” “Lobster Popstar,” “Hardstyle Fish”), Tommy Cash (“Espresso Macchiato,” “Untz Untz”), and the feature “Agent 813” with Danila Poperechnyy (2025). Her official website lists her goals as breaking into the gaming industry, directing a feature film, and becoming more involved in the art and fashion worlds.
Her visual style is characterized by bold, kitschy aesthetics, precise choreography, and a willingness to push boundaries — qualities that made Little Big’s videos instantly recognizable and helped the band build a global audience spanning Russia, Europe, the United States, and beyond.
Personal Life
Alina keeps her personal life private, though she has opened up in interviews about the tension between career and relationships. “I live alone and I like living alone. Basically, I am a self-sufficient person,” she told Petya Ploskov. “Often I understand that I would like a family and children. But I don’t know how it can be done with my schedule.”
She has said she hopes to marry once and make it last, and that she values mutual support in a partnership. The Little Big team has become like family to her over the years.