Since 2019, Natalya has been retracing the Great North route, the one from her childhood, to reach the Saami tundras on the Kola Peninsula in Russia, close to Finland and Norway. As a teenager, she was fascinated by the legends and history of the Saami people. Operating independently, Saprunova is her own sponsor. She travels alone, always equipped with her camera and a notebook, until, once there, through chance encounters, she builds relationships with the local communities who, moved by her project, welcome her and share their meals, culture, as well as their concerns and hopes. Natalya adopts their way of life, sewing, cooking, preparing stocks of wood and ice blocks. Saprunova works long-term, regularly returning to these extreme conditions, facing temperatures down to minus 60 degrees. In 2022, she discovers Yakutia and its indigenous populations, the Evenk reindeer herders and the more sedentary Yakuts who raise cows and horses.

Documentary photographer based in Paris, Natalya Saprunova is a member of the Zeppelin photo agency. During her graduate studies as a French teacher in Russia, she worked as a photojournalist for the Murmansk Messenger daily newspaper.

Arriving in France in 2008, she studied and worked in Communication / Marketing for 8 years in Paris. At the end of 2016, she gave up her permanent contract to return to photography. Naturalized French and graduated on Documentary Photojournalism from the EMI-CFD School in Paris at Spring 2020, she continues to explore the issues of modern society related to identity, integration, climate change, youth, femininity and spirituality.

Being passionate about the transmission of knowledge, she has been giving photography lessons at the Graine de Photographe school in Paris since the end of 2016.