Cisyk recorded "You Light Up My Life" for the film of the same title (Oscar and Golden Globe Awards win in 1978), sang the "Have you driven a Ford lately?"

[1] Her father, Wolodymyr Cisyk [uk], a well known Ukrainian concert violinist and teacher,[1] taught his daughter the violin when she was five years old, grooming her for a career as a classical musician.

[2] She received a violin scholarship to the Mannes College of Music, but had switched to classical voice training by the time of her graduation.

[6][7] The program featured Ukrainian folk dances, poems by Taras Shevchenko, songs performed by Kvitka Cisyk with guitar accompaniment by Bohdan Sokhan (a student from New York) and Yuriy Turchyn (a student at Rutgers University), and songs accompanied by Maria Tsysyk's piano.

The individual performances were harmoniously combined with photographic material from Ukraine and background music selected and played for the program by Maria Cisyk.

Cisyk's original goal was a career as an opera singer, but her father's death left the family without a source of income.

[8] Brooks, who wrote, directed and composed the score for the movie You Light Up My Life chose Cisyk to dub the singing voice of actress Didi Conn. Cisyk's performance of the song appears on the original soundtrack album, and was released as a single, although she was not listed as the performing artist in the final credits of the film (for which she successfully sued the producers).

"[9] Later, (according to Rakowicz's biographical essay[9]), Brooks made improper advances toward Cisyk, and after being rebuffed, didn't speak directly to her again, and continued to evade payments to her.

[1] In 1980 she recorded her first album, Kvitka, Songs of Ukraine which won top honors in the 1988 Ukrainian Music Awards.

Her sister, Maria Cisyk, a concert pianist and teacher, performed the solo piano selections on the record, and her mother, Iwanna, made sure her Ukrainian pronunciation was perfect.

The film examined the phenomenon of her life and career, and interviewed her relatives and close friends: husband Ed Rakowicz, son Eddie, family from Lviv and the United States, as well as peers and fans.

On April 4, 2013 premieres of the film took place in Kyiv, Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, Odesa, Luhansk and Chernivtsi.

[16] In September 2022 a street that was named after Soviet child actress Gulya Korolyova in Dnipro was renamed to honor Cisyk.