Athena Pashko was born on 10 October 1931 in the village of Bystrytsia, Drohobych district, Lwów Voivodeship, an administrative unit of interwar Poland. She graduated from Ukrainian National Forestry University.
Since the mid-1960s, she was persecuted and banned from publishing her works for defending repressed Ukrainian cultural figures. A reprimand was announced at her place of work, and searches were conducted in her apartment. In 1970, she signed an appeal to the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic with a demand to overturn the sentence of Veronica Morozova, for which she was fired. Pashko was constantly under KGB surveillance. In December 1991, the founding congress of the Ukrainian Womens Union took place in Kyiv, and Pashko was elected chair of the Union. She later held the title of, Honorary Chair of the Union of Ukrainian Women. After the tragic death of her husband, Viacheslav Chornovil, on 25 March 1999 in a car accident, Pashko continued her political mission, and was even called the guardian of the Peoples Movement of Ukraine. She died in Kyiv on 20 March 2012, and was buried in Kyiv at the Baikove Cemetery, next to her husband.