Contributors
Together with artists, designers, entrepreneurs, scholars, and scientists, we search for particularities and commonalities that make up the magical mosaic of today’s world
Distributed Cognition Cooperative
Research unit established by Anna Engelhardt and Sasha Shestakova to research post-soviet (de)coloniality. By exploring the relationship between material bodies and abstract machines, DCC aims to disentangle post-Soviet space from the notion that it is a single unified zone and to present it instead as a heterogeneous range of socio-economic histories and cultures.
Bloodburn
Qatari musician and game designer.
Metahaven
The work of Metahaven consists of filmmaking, writing, and design. Recent solo exhibitions include Turnarounds, e-flux, New York (2019), Version History, ICA London (2018), Earth, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2018), Hometown, Izolyatsia, Kiev (2018), and Information Skies, Auto Italia, London (2016). Among recent group exhibitions are Ghost:2651, Bangkok (2018), the Sharjah Biennial (2017), and the Gwangju Biennale (2016). Recent publications include PSYOP: An Anthology (Koenig Books, London, 2018), and Digital Tarkovsky (Strelka Press, Moscow, 2018).
The Mainline Group
The Mainline Group is an art and research duo of ancient storytellers armed for a discussion with the technosphere working internationally. Its two lungs are Lena Kilina (PhD, UNICAMP)—a visual anthropologist and performance artist; and Sofya Chibisguleva (MA, Royal College of Art)—a writer and sculptor. Their genres and tools of cultural engagement include sound art, audiobooks, art therapy, and printed media.
Hive Mind Records
vinyl led label specializing in vintage and contemporary sounds from around the globe.
Gabriel
Cameroonian refugee seeking asylum in Russia. EastEast does not disclose Gabriel's personal information for the sake of his security.
MSYLMA
Singer-songwriter and producer from Saudi Arabia, who combines experimental electronics with pre-Islamic and Quranic poetry sung in classical Arabic.
Senyawa
Musicians Rully Shabdara and Wukir Suryadi from Jogjakarta, Indonesia. Their works explore the aural elements of traditional music in the framework of experimental music practice.
Mississippi Records
Label and record shop originally founded in Portland in 2004, known for their reissues of old and rare soul, R&B, blues, punk, and folk from around the world.
YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES
YHCHI is Young-Hae Chang (Korea) and Marc Voge (USA). Based in Seoul, they write and animate texts set to their own music. They gave the 2020 Renato Poggioli Lecture at Harvard University.
Mariam Natroshvili and Detu Jincharadze
Tbilisi-based artist duo. Working mainly in public space, in their artistic projects they bring written or spoken words to different places in cities. Since 2020, Mariam and Detu moved their practice to the digital reality and started to use a video game engine to create videos and interactive installations. Their main topics of interest are: people and cities, contemporary rituals and mythology, heterotopias, lost and forgotten stories and history, words, words, words.
Koyil
Moscow-based musician and selector Lev Zhitskiy, focusing on experimental electronic music and folk traditions of the world.
Tamuna Ingorokva
Pioneer of Georgian fashion industry with two decades of design experience. Today INGOROKVA is one of the country’s most talked about luxury womenswear labels that creates collections featuring masculine cuts mixed with feminine touches. Inspired by personalities, moods, ambitions, desires, and the present, Tamuna Ingorokva presents timeless looks shaped by modern culture and art.
Elizaveta Abushinova
Translator and specialist in Chinese Studies. She graduated from the A.M. Gorky Institute of Literature and from the Interuniversity Faculty of Chinese, IAAS at Moscow State University, and took part in an internship program at Peking University. She now lives and works in Beijing.
Kirill Adibekov
Film curator at V-A-C Foundation and a Chevening alumnus (2018/2019). He holds an MA in Film and Screen Cultures from the University of Roehampton, London and was a member of the CICAE jury at Berlin International Film Festival (2018).
Nabi Agzamov
Architect and an urban designer from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, currently based in Moscow. His work focuses on designing a more sustainable and resilient urban environment. He worked and studied in New York where he was a student of Ziad Jamaleddine at Columbia GSAPP Urban Design Program.
Kamilla Akhmedova
Stylist from Tashkent, founder of 7/1 bureau. She has worked as an editor for Uzbek magazines and currently organizes public talks on fashion and consults with local brands to help them improve.
Morehshin Allahyari
Iranian-Kurdish media artist, activist, and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work questions current political, socio-cultural, and gender norms, with a particular emphasis on exploring the relationship between technology and art activism.
Alexander Anufriev
Photographer with international experience. He graduated from the Rodchenko Art School (2017), won the “Silver Camera” (2015) and also won the Feature Shoot Emerging Photography Awards (2017).
Arjun Appadurai
Indian-American anthropologist recognized as a major theorist in globalization studies. He is the Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, where he is also Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge. Arjun Appadurai has authored numerous books and scholarly articles, including Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Duke 2006), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minnesota 1996; Oxford India 1997), and Failure (co-authored with Neta Alexander; Polity, 2019).
Azad Asifovich
Curator and art researcher with a background in political science, culture studies, and curatorial studies. He is interested in relationships between artistic practice, contexts and its representation. Azad was a research assistant for the Azerbaijan Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. In 2016, he curated the first French solo show of Oksana Shachko, an artist, activist, and co-founder of the Femen movement. In 2018, he was invited by the Zadkine Museum (Paris), to create their performance programme. Since 2019, he is the associate curator at Ta(r)dino 6 Art Platform (Baku).
Mari Bastashevski
Artist and writer. At the moment, she spends a lot of time thinking through the tripartite relationship between animals, humans, and technology. She works as a lecturer and is a Ph.D. Candidate at Kunstakademiet in Trondheim Norway, and as a researcher with ALICE laboratory at EPFL in Lausanne. She is also an editor at Humanimalia, an open-access journal of human/animal studies soon to be relaunched in the omnivorous void between the two, in Utrecht, Netherlands. You can learn more about her work at www.maribastashevski.com or reach out to her directly at maribastashevski@gmail.com and twitter.com/maribst
Rabih Beaini
Lebanese electronic musician, dj, and curator based in Berlin, head of Morphine Records.
Łukasz Biederman
Born 1977 in Szklarska Poręba, lives and works in Wrocław, Poland. In his photography, his special interests are in documenting urban spaces, with an emphasis on locations wrapped in a specifically mysterious atmosphere. His collected works can be found in the artist's blog Rewiry paranormalne (Paranormal Zones) and on his website.
Wael Binali
Qatari orchestral and film music composer, based in West Hollywood, California.
Bruno Birmanis
Fashion designer based in Riga, Latvia. “I grew up in a family of theater actors, TV journalists and architects, and all of these areas are reflected in my perception of the world. For me, fashion creation is a tool for narrative, communication and mood creation, so I can be fully identified as a multidisciplinary artist. I am a creator focusing on fashion and art, culture and design. I curate ideas somewhere between untamed mind and sophistication, curious brain games and simplicity.”
Bermet Borubaeva
Cultural worker and researcher based in Bishkek. She researches the political economy of urban ecology. Bermet is a co-founder of a number of initiatives: “Preobrazhensky Cooperative,” a comic strip about invisible labor “Ya.Eda,” a mobile game “Migrant School,” #БишкекСмог (Bishkek Managed), #ФудшерингвБишкеке (Foodsharing in Bishkek) and the Bishkek School of Contemporary Art. She has been taking part in numerous international and regional projects as well as writing on urban ecology, labor, gender equality, and contemporary art.
Olga Brednikova
Sociologist, leading researcher at the Center for Independent Sociological Research. Graduated from the European University at St. Petersburg. For over 20 years she has been engaged in urban studies and research on migration from the post-Soviet region.
Anna Bronovitskaya
Architectural historian, Professor at the Moscow Architecture School (MARCH), Head of Research at the Institute of Modernism.
Oleksandr Burlaka
Kiev-based artist and architect, works with photography and exhibitional display. Oleksandr was the member of Melnychuk-Burlaka group (2007-2011) and Grupa Predmetiv (2011-2016), co-founder and member of the curatorial and activist interdisciplinary group Hudrada (Ukrainian for "Creative Committee"). As a photographer, he contributed to Kiew Architekturführer by DOM Publishers, Balcony Chic and Orthodox Chic by Osnovy.
Yiannis Christidis
A sound anthropologist, ethnographer, and designer. His academic and artistic research focuses on the cultural aspect of sound, its functionality in everyday activities and the relationship between the listeners and their place.
Sarah Davachi
Composer and performer of electroacoustic music from Canada. Her projects are primarily concerned with psychoacoustics of aural spaces, utilizing extended durations and simple harmonic structures. Davachi holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Calgary and a master's degree in electronic music and recording media from Mills College in Oakland, California. She is currently a doctoral candidate in musicology at UCLA and is based in Los Angeles, California, USA.
Masha Demianova
Photographer based in Moscow. Before turning to photography, she studied journalism and worked as a photo shoot producer. She has taken photographs for Dazed, i-D, Vogue, Metal, Purple among others.
Anna Deryabova
Artist, graduated from the Department of Graphic Arts at the Moscow State Stroganov Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts. Works mainly in the technique of printed graphics.
Christina Dimitriadis
Uses photography as a medium to express an autobiographical stance based on human relationships in terms of the concept of identity. Her work has been exhibited internationally, solo shows includes City of Athens Arts Center, Badisches Landesmuseum Schloss Karlsruhe, Galeria Studio (Warsaw), Citizen’s Art Center (Kanazawa), Galerie Deux (Tokyo) and Eigen+Art Gallery (Berlin). She lives and works in Berlin.
Iskandar Ding
Linguist and blogger based in London, United Kingdom. He holds a BA in French and Linguistics from Oxford University and is currently finishing his MA in Iranian Studies at SOAS University of London. He blogs about the shared lexical heritage of the Persianate cultural sphere on his blog Vājabāz, as well as Persian language and literature for the London-based institution Persian Language Online.
Stefan Williamson Fa
Anthropologist and music producer from Gibraltar. His research and works focus on religion, music, and everyday forms of sonic expression in the Caucasus, Anatolia, and the Mediterranean. Stefan is a co-founder of Mountains of Tongues, a non-profit project which aims to promote musical diversity in the Caucasus.
Boris Falikov
Historian of religion, Associate Professor at the Center for the Study of Religion at the Russian State Humanitarian University. Author of Neo-Hinduism and Western Culture (Moscow, Nauka: 1994); Cults and Culture (Moscow, Russian State University for the Humanities, 2007); Eastern religions, occultism and art of the twentieth century, (Moscow, UFO, 2017). He researches new forms of religion and their impact on art.
Elizaveta Fokina
Special Features and News Editor at EastEast. Author of non-acid arab telegram-channel. Independent researcher on contemporary art from Arab region. Graduated from the RSUH with a degree in Middle Eastern Studies with Arabic language. Lives in Moscow.
Mikhail Garder
Anthropologist, translator. Graduated from the Department of European Languages of the Russian State University for the Humanities, holds an MA in folklore studies.
Mark Gergis
A London-based Iraqi-American artist, producer, audio-visual archivist, and founder of the Syrian Cassette Archives.
Zoey Gong
Traditional Chinese Medicine chef and nutritionist. Born in Shanghai, China, Zoey now lives in New York City, where she hosts pop-up medicinal dinners and collaborates with various brands to teach the wisdom of medicinal cooking. She is the founder of Five Seasons TCM, a boutique wellness brand that shares and modernizes the knowledge of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) food therapy through educational content and functional products.
Varvara Grankova
She graduated from the Free Workshops Contemporary Art School. She won the Arte Laguna Prize 2020 and was the finalist of the tretiakovprize. Her works are a part of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art collection.
Maria Gribova
Cinema scholar, master of art criticism and contributor to Cineticle online journal.
Tinatin Gurgenidze
Co-founder and artistic director of the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial. She studied architecture and urban design in Tbilisi and Barcelona. Currently, she is working on her PhD thesis concerning the (post-) Soviet mass housing settlement of Gldani, a suburb of Tbilisi. Lives and works in Berlin.
Shen Haobo
Chinese poet, publisher, and the co-founder of Xiron Books based in Beijing. He was born in 1976 in Taixing, Jiangsu province. His latest collection of poems, Night of Hualian, was published in 2019.
Bora Hong
She has been curating various art and design exhibitions, as well as commissioning public art projects. Bora Hong was the Director of Gallery FACTORY, Seoul, Korea, from 2002 to 2018, and remains its curatorial advisor to date.
Yuk Hui
Philosopher from Hong Kong dealing with digital objects and the politics and poetics of technology, a computer engineer working on an alternative architecture for social networks, the author of books and articles on the philosophy of technology, media theory, and cybernetics, and a student of Bernard Stigler.
Mothanna Hussein
Music curator and visual designer based in Amman, Jordan.
Vlad Ilkevich
Music and pop culture writer, editor and translator from Belarus, author of the По една песен на ден telegram channel.
Nastya Indrikova
Visual & Ethnographic Research Editor and Photo Editor at EastEast. Author of «Мурмолка», the channel on museum anthropology. She worked as a Photo Editor at Arzamas and Esquire Russia, took part in the expeditions of the Center for Typology and Semiotics of Folklore and the Educational and the Scientific Laboratory of Folklore Studies of the Institute of Philology and History at Russian State Humanitarian University (Moscow).
Debora Ipekel
Worldwide FM and NTS Radio host and co-founder of the Zel Zele record label.
Nabihah Iqbal
London-based musician, producer, DJ, and broadcaster.
Mohamad Ziad Jamaleddine
Assistant Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (NY), and co-founder of L.E.FT Architects (Beirut/NY). Practitioner and scholar with a research focus on architecture in West Asia and North Africa, rigorously interrogating topics such as religious architecture and religiosity in public space.
Rakhim Kalybaev
Photographer, designer, and musician. Lives and works in Tashkent.
Joosung Kang
Graphic designer based in Helsinki and Seoul. He participated in exhibitions such as Typojanchi 2019: 6th International Typography Biennale (Culture Station Seoul, 2019), The Lives of Others (Factory2, 2018, Seoul), TypoCraft Helsinki (Lokal, 2017), Urban Gastronomy (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, 2016, Seoul).
George Keburia
Self-taught Georgian designer, he founded his fun-loving eponymous label in 2010, presenting a surrealist collection saturated with outlandish concepts and references. The style of Keburia is a mix of underground and classy looks. His collections present a modern interpretation of femininity with the use of raw and provoking silhouettes, exaggerated shapes, mixing light and heavy fabrics.
Bulat Khalilov
Ethnographer, journalist, co-founder of the Ored Recordings label, specializing in field recordings of authentic traditional music from the Caucasus, Russia, and the world. Lives and works in Nalchik.
Diana Khamis
Researcher, translator and philosopher. She was born in Moscow, grew up in Lebanon, and now lives in the Netherlands. A graduate of the American University of Beirut and Bonn University, she studies determinations, delimitaions, the construction of imaginary worlds and the self-construction of nature.
Jenia Kim
Fashion designer, who lives in between Moscow and Tashkent. Founder of the J.Kim brand.
Teresa Yejoo Kim
Korean-American ethnographer, writer, and creator who lives and works between Los Angeles and Seoul. She studied literature, film studies, and anthropology in New York, London, Seoul, and Chicago. Yejoo is currently a PhD student in anthropology at UCLA and is interested in border logic, peacemaking, infrastructure, sovereignty, militarization, and media theory and production.
Christopher Kirkley
Archivist, artist, curator, and director from Portland, Oregon who runs the label Sahel Sounds dedicated to music from West Africa.
Jun Kitazawa
Artist working with community-based projects. Born in Tokyo. Got a PhD from Tokyo University of the Art. In 2016, Kitazawa was listed in Forbes' 30 Under 30 Asia and selected as a fellow of Japan Foundation Asia Center. Jun currently lives and works in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Bogna Konior
Writer and an academic, focusing on digital culture, philosophy of technology, and new media. She is currently a research fellow at NYU Shanghai, Interactive Media Arts department and at the AI and Culture Research Centre. Her recent work can be found at www.bognamk.com
Olga Kononova
Architect and artist currently based in Odessa. She graduated from Odessa State Academy of Architecture, and is an alumna of the 2015/2016 Hybrid Urbanism program at Strelka Institute. Olga works with a range of projects from urban scaling to the research of local architectural forms. She is interested in the embodiment of space in cinema and art, sensual perception of architecture in daily life and on-screen.
Egor Korneev
Expert in the history of the Arabic region and Islam. He researches sufism from the historical perspective as well as in the regional context of contemporary Western Asia. Egor Korneev graduated from the Institute of Asian and African Countries at Lomonosov Moscow State University in 2019. He is based in Moscow.
Artyom Kosmarski
Anthropologist, sociologist of science, expert in Asian and Islamic studies. He is the director of Neon.University, a project dedicated to teaching rare, difficult, and uncommon subjects, and a senior researcher at the Institute for Cultural Studies at Moscow Higher School of Economics.
Artem Krapivin
Head of programming for the EastEast Radio stream, co-founder of Enthusiast Records, part of the team of the Moscow FM radio station Radio Kultura 91.6.
Victoria Kravtsova
Feminist researcher and manager of cultural projects. She was born in Smolensk as is currently based in Berlin. Victoria works with the topics of feminism, decolonization, and anti-racism in the former USSR states.
Eugene Kuchinov
Philosopher, historian, translator, editor of the lmnt < elementary [...] data recorder > platform, research assistant at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University. Among his interests are ontological and epistemological anarchism, panpsychism, philosophy of technics. He read lectures during a public program to accompany Tomás Saraceno's Moving Atmospheres (Garage Museum, Moscow) and the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art (Ekaterinburg). Lives and works in Kaliningrad.
Ikuru Kuwajima
Artist, photographer, and writer based in Moscow. He was born in Japan and studied photojournalism in the Missouri University, USA. He has been traveling a lot and working on personal projects in Eastern European and Central Asian countries.
Su-Ying Lee
Independent curator living in Toronto, Canada or Dish With One Spoon Territory (Southern Ontario). Her work has taken place across Canada, in Hong Kong, Mexico City, and Quezon City (Metro Manila). Su-Ying Lee's website.
Nikita Lin
Writer, curator, researcher, producer in the fields of contemporary art, architecture, design, media theory, science and technology studies. She graduated in 2014 from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Currently lives and works in Shanghai.
Vladimir Lyashchenko
Video essayist and film critic, teacher at the Moscow Film School. Graduated from the Department of Philosophy of Moscow State University.
Alexandra Mayboroda
Independent researcher based in Kiev. She holds a degree in philosophy and studies problems of material agency.
Hisham Mayet
A record collector, filmmaker, and co-founder of the Seattle-based label Sublime Frequencies.
Achilles Mbembe
Cameroonian philosopher, political theorist, and public intellectual. He is a Research Professor of History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, South Africa, and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University. Mbembe is an author of several books, among which are De la postcolonie. Essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine (On the Postcolony) (Paris, Karthala, 2000; University of California Press, 2001) and Critique of Black Reason (Duke University Press, 2017).
Scott McCulloch
Works with prose, essay, and sound. His writings have appeared in 3:AM, Australian Book Review, Southerly, at the University of Paris Diderot, at the Writers' House of Georgia, and elsewhere. Scott was a recipient of the Marten Bequest for Prose 2017–19, put toward the development and realisation of his first novel, Basin. He's been living in eastern Europe since 2014.
Jonas Mekas
American cinematographer and poet of Lithuanian descent, one of the leaders of new American cinema and “the godfather of New-York avant-garde cinema.” He invented the genre of diary film essay, worked with Andy Warhol and artists of the Fluxus movement and cofounded Anthology Film Archives—the first independent center for preservation, study, and demonstration of experimental cinema.
Amine Metani
Musician, director of the Shouka label, and curator of the Arabstazy platform.
You Mi
Curator, lecturer at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. You Mi works with ancient and futuristic technologies and networks. She is one of the curators of the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2020–2021).
Walter Mignolo
William H. Wannamaker Distinguished Professor of Romance Studies and Professor of Literature; and Director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University. His books related to these topics include: The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995); Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of Decoloniality (2007), Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000), The Idea of Latin America (2006), On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analysis, Praxis co-authored with Catherine Walsh (2018) and The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (2021).
Vincent Moon
An independent filmmaker, photographer, and sound artist from Paris known for his work as the main director of Blogotheque's Take Away Shows and for his label Collection Petites Planètes. More information can be found on the label's site, as well as on Bandcamp and on Instagram.
Katya Muromtseva
Ekaterina Muromtseva was born in 1990 in Moscow. In 2017, she graduated from the Rodchenko Art School. She studied at the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University. Muromtseva works with different media, including installations, video and graphics.
Fahmi Mursyid
Contemporary musician, composer, sound designer, and producer based in Bandung, Indonesia.
Gyula Muskovics
Curator and artist based in Budapest, Hungary. As a Ph.D. student at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, he researches avant-garde fashion in Eastern Europe with an emphasis on the work of Hungarian fashion designer Tamás Király.
Ian Nagoski
Music researcher and record producer specializing in early 20th century musics in languages other than English. Founder of the Canary Records label. Lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.
Roman Nasonov
Music historian. Since 1996 he has been teaching at the Subdepartment of Foreign Music History, Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory. Associate Professor since 2004. Since 1998 he has been teaching also at the Subdepartment of Literary and Art Criticism and Publicism at the Department of Journalism, Lomonosov Moscow State University. He is the author of Music: Dialogue with God. From Archaic to Electronics (2021).
Otar Nemsadze
Co-founder of the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial. He holds an M.Arch degree from the Georgian Technical University and an M.Sc. in Urban Management and Development from the Institute of Housing and Urban Development Studies, Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He is currently doing his PhD at Tbilisi State University, focusing on land ownership and conflict.
Alieta (Tatuna) Nikolaishvili
Georgian designer based in Tbilisi. She graduated from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts and established her brand in 2009 under the name Tatuna. She is known for her extraordinary pattern cuts, minimalistic lines and pastel colours. Enjoys drawing, sketching and pattern cutting. Her clothes are handmade from luxurious fabrics and her creations are sold worldwide.
Margo Ovcharenko
Moscow based artist. She graduated from Rodchenko Art School in 2011 and Hunter College MFA program in spring 2015. In 2010–2011, Margo was a resident at FABRICA S.P.A. (Treviso, Italy). Her zine Country of Women was shortlisted for Paris Photo–Aperture photo first photobook award in 2018. Since 2019, she's been teaching photography at Rodchenko Art School.
Furqat Palvan-Zade
Editor-in-chief at EastEast. Co-founder of Syg.ma and Budka (Tbilisi). Author of the "Tashkent-Tbilisi" telegram-channel. This year he will join the Sandberg Instituut's "F for Fact" program.
Augustine Paredes
Filipino artist and photographer based in Dubai. Recently, he self-published his first artist book entitled Conversations at the end of the universe. He was born on a Thursday.
Kseniya Petrova
Journalist and growth editor, based in Moscow. She graduated from HSE Master's Programme in Applied Cultural Studies and worked as a writer and a growth editor at Wonderzine.
Tanya Pioniker
Artist. Born in Moscow in 1994. She graduated from the Institute of Contemporary Art (2013) and the Faculty of International Journalism of MGIMO (2015). Tanya Pioniker mainly works with graphics, using not only classical techniques but also materials at hand as well as important artifacts. Her main method is personal mythology.
Daniil Pleshak
Philologist, journalist, and Ph.D. candidate at Saint-Petersburg State University. He is interested in Byzantine and Old Russian literature, medieval religious thought, narratology, and critical theory.
Manishankar Prasad
He is a PhD Geography student at the National University of Singapore, who writes about post oil Khaleeji futures. You can also find Manishankar on Twitter: @change_thinker
Lesia Prokopenko
Senior Editor at EastEast. Researcher and writer with a curatorial background, she is studying Chinese Philosophy at East China Normal University in Shanghai.
Balázs Pándi
Hungarian drummer, record collector, and cook. He has worked and toured with various acts from all around the world including Venetian Snares, Merzbow, and Trevor Dunn.
Bella Radenović
Art historian and environmental activist, based in London. Bella is doing a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and her thesis focuses on the visual culture of medieval Georgia. Her research interests include cross-cultural exchange in the Eastern Mediterranean and the South Caucasus, materiality of inscriptions and collective patronage of art in mountainous regions such as Svaneti. She is the editor-in-chief of immediations, Courtauld's annual peer-reviewed journal.
Maksym Rokmaniko
Designer and researcher whose work explores new forms of urban living enabled by emerging technologies. Maksym is the director of The Center for Spatial Technologies.
Kirill Rozhentsov
Senior Editor at EastEast and Editor-in-Chief at Syg.ma. He studied finance at Plekhanov Russian University of Economics and philosophical anthropology at Russian State University for the Humanities. Lives in St.Petersburg.
Irakli Rusadze
Founder of Situationist. Sophisticated forms, quirky tailoring, and elemental colors are the hallmark of the brand. He easily gained recognition within and outside of the country by raising important subjects through fashion. The collections are characterized by reflective geometric constructions, strong lines, and sharp shoulders. They feature silhouettes, cuts, details, and proportions of Georgian traditional clothing. Every outfit reflects the region’s history, identity, and way of life.
Kamila Rustambekova
Photographer from Tashkent. She specializes in portrait photography and has an interest in fashion.
Polina Ryzhova
Literary critic, producer at Individuum publishing house, cohost of the Polka podcast dedicated to Russian literature. Worked as an editor for Gazeta.Ru. Her texts have been published in Gorky.media, Seance.ru, Wonderzine, The Village, and Russian Reporter. Graduated from the Journalism Department at Moscow State University of Foreign Affairs with specialization in Hindi and Urdu.
Alexandra Sankova
General director and founder of the Moscow Design Museum. She established the non-profit organization New Graphics, which organized exhibitions and educational events with international experts in Russia (2001–2007). In 2007–2012 she was Senior Advisor for Cultural Affairs at the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Moscow.
Sergey Sapozhnikov
Artist, photographer, curator. He was born in 1984 in Rostov-on-Don and graduated from the Department of Psychology of the Southern Federal University, later he studied at the Moscow Institute of Contemporary Art. Lives and works in Rostov-on-Don.
Karina Sembe
Interdisciplinary scholar, author, editor. PhD in World Literature, PhD Candidate in Hispanic Studies, Teaching Fellow, Boston University. Main research areas: social mobility of African Diaspora in the Americas, power relations, politics of the archive, methodological challenges of the Humanities and Social Sciences, integration of the Humanities beyond academia.
Jafer Shifa
Book seller from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. He is a founder of one of the biggest book stores in the city called Jafer Books.
Gigi Shukakidze
Co-founder of the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial. Gigi completed his studies at the Georgian Technical University, Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning. He lives and works in Tbilisi, where in 2013 opened his own architectural practice Wunderwerk, with a broad range of projects and an experimental-analytic direction. Since 2016 he is an invited independent expert for the Mies Award Prize.
Olga Shurygina
Born in Russia, Olga is a multimedia artist creating her projects in Uzbekistan, her mother’s homeland. She graduated from the Moscow Art and Industry Institute in 2013. In her works, Olga uses a variety of media—from subject art, installations, and performance, to social research and cinema. She addresses the topic of her female gelealogy: both her grandmother and mother came from Uzbekistan. Olga treats the country as a timeless space, a portal where she finds answers to questions.
Artiom Slota
Researcher and activist. He graduated from the Institute of Philosophy at the Saint-Petersburg State University and specializes in the nationalisms within Muslim societies. Lately, he has been taking part in various Russian and international human rights initiatives helping migrants and refugees. He is the founder of the dõst project dedicated to diversity policy in Russia, Central Asia, and the Caucausus.
Maria Smagar
Historian, editor, specialist in medieval European manuscript culture, and a Ph.D. candidate at Moscow State University.
Nikolay Smirnov
Moscow-based artist, geographer, curator, and researcher. He took part in the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial (2019) and the 2nd Riga Biennial (2020); was a resident at Para Site (Hong Kong, 2019) and Villa Vassilieff (Paris, 2017–2018).
Vik Sohonie
A Grammy-nominated producer who is committed to decolonizing image-making industries. Vik’s work in music and journalism centers around ensuring the West is not the sole interpreter of our world and uses his record label, Ostinato Records, to provide a soundtrack to the resistance.
Nikolay Steblin-Kamenskiy
Specialist in African studies. He studied the Amharic language at the Faculty of Asian and African Studies at Saint Petersburg State University and sociolinguistics at the Faculty of Anthropology at European University in Saint-Petersburg. He is interested in contemporary Ethiopian culture and is currently working on his thesis dedicated to labor migration in Ethiopia, as well as studying African collections at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera).
Denis Stolyarov
Russian art historian, specializing in the institutional history of contemporary art. He is currently living in London after receiving a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Kirill Svetlyakov
Moscow-based curator. He has been working at the State Tretyakov Gallery since 2006. His recent curatorial projects include The Thaw. 1953-1968 (2016), Hyperrealism. When Reality Becomes an Illusion (2015), Dmitry Prigov: From the Renaissance to Conceptualism and Beyond (2014), Decoration of the Beautiful. Elitism and Kitsch in Contemporary Art (2012), all at the State Tretyakov Gallery. In 2011 Svetlyakov received the Independent Sergey Kuryokhin Contemporary Art Award for his exhibition Hostages of Voids that had been part of the IV Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art.
Zoé T. Vizcaíno
Visual artist with a background in psychology, working primarily with video installations and photography. Born in Mexico City, Zoé T. Vizcaíno is based in Madrid.
Nahla Tabbaa
Artist, potter, cook, gardener, educator, program curator, project manager, and culinary ethnographer.
Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena
Musician and ethnomusicologist currently located between Denver, Colorado and Bali. He is in the midst of research, composition, and production on baleganjur and heavy metal music through the lenses of performance, cosmology, and environmentalism.
Makar Tereshin
Anthropologist and photographer. His major research interests include the anthropology of space and the Russian North. Based in Saint Petersburg.
Tamiko Thiel
Artist. Tamiko Thiel was awarded the 2018 Visionary Pioneer Award by the Society for Art and Technology Montreal for her (now over 35) years of media artworks exploring the interplay of place, space, the body, and cultural identity. She was the lead product designer on the Connection Machine CM1/CM2 AI supercomputer, in 1989 the fastest computer on earth, which is now in the collection of MoMA NY. Tamiko began working with virtual reality in 1994 as a producer and creative director of Starbright World (1994–97), in collaboration with Steven Spielberg. Her first VR art installation Beyond Manzanar (2000) is in the collection of the San Jose Museum of Art, and her AR commissions include Unexpected Growth for the Whitney Museum, now in the permanent collection.
Madina Tlostanova
A transdiasporic (Circassian-Uzbek) feminist thinker and fiction writer and a professor of postcolonial feminisms at the Department of Thematic Studies (Gender studies) at Linköping University (Sweden). Her most recent books are Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art: Resistance and Re-existence (2017), What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (2018), and the forthcoming A new Political Imagination. Making the Case, co-authored with Tony Fry (2020)
Vera Trakhtenberg
Art critic, curator of the Cultural Creative Agency. She worked as a curator of the START project at WINZAVOD. The exhibitions she produced include Phantom memory of a beautiful era, MUZEON, 2014; Sculptures that we do not see, Central Exhibition Hall “Manezh,” 2015; Worker and Kolkhoz Woman. Personal File, IEC Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, 2015 (co-curator); Faith in a Deep Crisis, Victoria Gallery, Samara, 2019. Vera Trakhtenberg is also a lecturer at the School of Design, National Research University Higher School of Economics.
Anka Tsitsishvili
Creative director and buyer of IERI Store, co-founder of INDEXflat. Anka acts as a fashion advisor for brands and fashion businesses, launches show-rooms in Moscow and Paris, curates exhibitions of contemporary artists. She studied and established her career in Moscow, but now she is based in Tbilisi, Georgia. Anka has a son Ilia and raises him together with her boyfriend, a famous contemporary artist Alexey Dubinsky.
Aslı Uludag
Artist based in Istanbul. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MA in Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University. The work of Asli Uludag explores the materiality and spatio-temporality of techno-scientiic, architectural, and legal structures that organize the relationship between existents. With her practice, she generates tools which make visible their politics and ecological implications.
Nadezhda Vikulina
Works with Russian, American, and Polish poetry and translations. She studied literature at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University and holds an MA from the University of Oregon. Born in Dimitrovgrad.
Ben Wheeler
Music Features and News Editor at EastEast. Experimental musician, сomposer and musicologist, co-founder of Mountains of Tongues organization. He performs regularly at venues and festivals around the Caucasus and has contributed to the soundtrack and sound design for multiple independent films. He also organizes the annual Caucasus All Frequency Festival, and hosts and produces the podcast Caucasus All Frequency.
Henk Wildschut
Dutch documentary photographer based in Amsterdam. He studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and travels a lot, working on personal and commercial projects.
Howard Williams
Record collector, distributor, and DJ. He is the founder of Japan Blues and has a long running show on NTS radio by the same name.
Zhu Xiaowen
Artist and writer, based in Berlin. Her work is concerned with how things and beings migrate across time (historical and contemporary) and space (borders and boundaries) with a particular interest in personal witness and testimony. Zhu Xiaowen has received the Civitella Ranieri Visual Arts Fellowship, TASML Artist Residency Award, Marylyn Ginsburg Klaus Fellowship, Jury Award of DOK Munich, among others. She is a guest lecturer at Heidelberg University and the Assistant Director of Times Art Center Berlin. Read more on the artist’s website.
Jeffrey Ying
Collector and designer who lives between Shanghai and the US. His interests include obscure 1970s disco as well as Chinese and Japanese art.
Andrei Zailer
Independent curator and program director, co-founder of experimental music and performance series TKANI. He is currently based in Tbilisi.
Hamdam Zakirov
Poet and record collector, living in Helsinki. He is one of the authors belonging to the renowned Ferghana school of poetry, whose poems have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Hamdam has been performing as a DJ and taking part in various events and festivals in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Germany, and Israel since 2016. He records mixes that feature Soviet grooves and hosts a podcast dedicated to popular Uzbek music.
Inzhener Zemli
Broadcaster, DJ and selector Pavel Amirov, who’s focused on local music scenes frp, different parts of the world and varied periods of its history. Based in Moscow.
Yelena Zhelezov
Artist working with sculpture, video, and text, based in Los Angeles and Belarus
Timur Zolotoev
Journalist and Senior Editor at Strelka Mag, the online magazine of Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design.
Valeriy Zolotukhin
Russian theater scholar, Senior Researcher at the School of Advanced Studies in the Humanities (The Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration).
Anna Zoria
Artist living and working in Canada and France. She makes work about doing nothing, anticipation, boredom, and repetition.
