Ganna Anufriieva is an Odesa-based artist. In 2012, she graduated from Grekov Art School (specializing in painting), and in 2015, she graduated from the Lviv National Academy of Arts, where she studied monumental painting. Her work has been featured in shows in Ukraine and abroad. In 2017, she took part in the School of Performance in Lviv, and in 2018, she joined the Kyiv art collective Hlebzawod. In 2018, she began work on the urban art project Vodoyma (Ukrainian for “body of water”). In 2019, she participated in the first Culture of Neighborliness School in Odesa.

Natasha Chychasova is an independent curator, cultural manager, and researcher who works mainly in the field of contemporary art with the themes of historical memory, the internal dynamics of artistic communities, institutional critique, and art education. In 2018, she graduated from the master’s program in Art History at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.

As a curator, she works with topics including rethinking the Soviet legacy (the show City Without An Appointment at ArtSvit Gallery, Dnipro), personal narratives (the project Suitcases Of Crimean Human Rights Defenders), and the problems of local communities (the project Finally, We Are Here on Ukrainian migrant workers at Miejski Ośrodek Sztuki, Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland). In 2017, Chychasova worked as a curatorial assistant for the Festival of Young Artists at the Mystetsky Arsenal. For a year and a half, she was a project manager and coordinator of the public program at the IZOLYATSIA Platform for Cultural Initiatives. Currently, together with Anastasia Tsissar, she is working on a project as part of the Insha Osvita Living History Studios program, drawing on interviews with Kharkiv artists to prepare a publication preserving the memory of the old downtown studios that historically anchored the city’s art scene.

Ashot Danielyan is a poet, rock musician, writer, and the curator of various art projects. He graduated from the Tashkent State Institute of Oriental Studies in 2006, studying Japanese Language and Literature. His senior thesis dealt with the work of Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Since 2006, he has been the front man and lyricist for the Tashkent-based rock band Origami Wings and participated in local and international festivals.

Danielyan is the author of editorials on local history (Japanese, Australian, and Central Asian), as well as the winner of the international literary competition Novellasia 2016.

For the last several years, he has collaborated closely with the Goethe Institute Tashkent on projects including Poetry Slam (as a several-time finalist and member of the jury) and Converter (as the author of articles on contemporary youth problems).

In 2007, he became the founder and coproducer of Uzbekistan’s only established independent rock festival, Ilkhom Rock Fest, which takes place in a theater space.

Danielyan is an art activist and the creator and producer of the multidisciplinary project Man with a Stool, which is dedicated to developing young creatives and supporting local art communities in Uzbekistan.

Zulya Esentaeva is a Bishkek-based artist and student at the ArtEast School of Contemporary Art.

She is involved in individual and collective multi-media practices that explore nature-human interactions

in the age of the Capitalocene by re-locating them into an imaginary past or future.

Armenak Grigoryan is an artist, art historian, and curator. His preliminary art education took place at the Hakob Kojoyan Art Educational Complex (1997–2002). In 2008, he received his bachelor’s degree from the State Academy of Fine Arts in Yerevan, and in 2011, his master’s. From 2009 to 2010, he studied Designing and Implementing a Cultural Program at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Yerevan.

As a final project for the program in 2010, Grigoryan helped to coordinate an international festival, held in Ijevan, called Encounters on the Border. Since then, Grigoryan has worked as an assistant curator and consultant for the exhibitions The Artist of Translation: Vigen Tadevosyan (2015), Fixations (2015), and What Is Hamasteghtsakan Art? (2016). In 2017, he curated the Annual Festival of Alternative Art at the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art. 

Grigoryan’s works have been featured in group shows such as The Sun of the Sleepless (2018), Gyumri Living Art (Gallery25, Gyumri/Yerevan, 2014), the 8th Gyumri International Biennial (2012), and Armenian Threads (Manchester, 2013), a two-person show with Sarah Greaves. In 2010, he won second place in the Goethe Institute’s Space to Space public art competition.

Oksana Kapishnikova is a curator, researcher, and art manager. She holds a master’s degree in Applied Cultural Studies from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Since February 2019, she has been working as the Senior Researcher in the Educational Department at the Gapar Aitiev Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts. 

Kapishnikova has been curating exhibitions in the field of contemporary art since 2010. Among her projects are the feminist exhibition and discussion program Tomorrow: Sketches of Your and My History (2016, co-curator); the research-based exhibition Art and Emancipation: O. Manuilova and Her Contemporaries (2015, co-curator), and On, Off, the First Central Asian Youth Project of Contemporary Art (2010, head curator). 

Kapishnikova has participated in regional and international contemporary art programs, including capacity-building programs for Kyrgyz museums at the Center for Museum Initiatives (2016); the Third Moscow Curatorial Summer School (2013); and the Art and Production scholarship program organized by the School of Theory and Activism, Bishkek (2013).

She has been a member of ICOM since 2016. In 2019, she became the Executive Secretary of ICOM Kyrgyzstan.

Alexandra Novak was born in Ukraine, grew up in southern Moldova, and now lives in Transnistria, where she studies and practices photography, design, project-based work, and street art. In college, Novak studied Applied Arts and Handicrafts and earned a teaching certification. Currently, aside from being an artist and an activist, she is also the mother of a dinosaur fanatic.

In 2016, she had a solo show, Color Silhouette, and in 2017, a solo public project, Street Photographer: Transnistria (meant to bring city residents together in an alternative space). In 2018, Novak completed the photo project Being Yourself (a collaboration with the Czech human rights organization People in Need). That same year she carried out the project Your Birthright on children’s rights, quoting from the Convention on the Rights of the Child in public with visual accompaniment. For the past two years, Novak has collaborated with the Oberliht association and engaged with public space and the local community. In 2019, she worked to introduce street art to the city of Rîbnița (working with the city administration) and prepared a series of workshops for artists and enthusiastic young people.

Aigerim Ospanova is a multimedia artist who works with urban space and society and studies the interrelationship between the two through her artistic practice. She draws on her own story to demonstrate how people respond to a change of scenery.

As part of her Astana Art Show residency, Ospanova made interventions throughout Astana, focusing on transformations in the definition of hospitality shaped by urbanization and on how culturally established human relations change in urban contexts. Since 2018, she has been working on developing neighbourly relations between courtyard residents and building a constructive dialogue between them and business. Ospanova manages the Korshiler project, which is being implemented in the new districts of Astana. Korshiler serves as a platform for improving relations between neighbors, provides them with an opportunity to find like-minded people and form communities, and allows for continued engagement with other urban communities and businesses.

Alexey Rumyantsev is an artist and activist who has been involved in contemporary art projects since 2006. He works in the genres of video art, installation, public art, and new media. His art investigates ongoing political processes in the Central Asian region, changes in the status of public space, the level of self-censorship in Central Asia, and interpretations of “national identity.”

Qafar Rzayev resides in Ganja, Azerbaijan, where he was born in 1993. After two years of undergraduate studies at Ganja State University, he quit school to devote his time and energy to art. His street art and graffiti work started appearing on the walls of the city of Ganja in 2016; besides that, Qafar also works in painting, conceptual art, and graphic design.

Qafar explores the artistic dimensions of shabaka, an Azerbaijani national ornament, and researches the archeomodern nature of Azerbaijani culture and society. His works have been featured in solo shows in Spain and Greece, as well as in group exhibitions. Recently, his art has started to involve people and communities, exploring the role of the artist as a “messenger” between museum and community.

Sophia Sadovskaya is an independent curator, art manager, and art educator based in Minsk, Belarus. She curates the Environmental Visual Audial Art project (2012–present), which integrates practices of environmental activism and contemporary art.

Sadovskaya’s main project during the last year has been the exhibition and research project People Without Limits, co-curated with Anna Karpenko and devoted to an alternative perspective on contemporary art, focusing on artists not included in the discourse of contemporary Belarusian art. During the last two years, Sadovskaya has curated the educational program for many exhibitions at Ў Gallery of Contemporary Art, including Without Exceptions, Zbor, and Movaland. She is the coauthor of Belarusian Art of the 20th Century, a series of children's books.

Nadya Sayapina is an artist who works in painting, performance, mixed media, installations, and land art. Born in 1989 in Minsk, Belarus, she received her bachelor’s in Applied Arts from the Belarusian State University of Culture and Arts in 2011 and her master’s in Art History from the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus in 2012. She studies art education and techniques for facilitating dialogue through work with associative perceptions of heroes, context, performative practices, and processuality.

Oleksii Salmanov is a Kyiv- and Odesa-based artist. Born in 1976, he studied law at the International Solomon University in Kyiv. After graduating in 1998, he worked as a lawyer for several organizations until 2003. He began his career as an artist in 2008.

Salmanov is the winner of the 2009 Pinchuk Art Centre Special Prize for young Ukrainian artists. He has no formal art schooling, but the prize allowed him to complete an internship at Olafur Eliasson's studio in Berlin in 2010.

Salmanov works in various media, including photography, video, sculpture and installations, site-specific and street art, and performance. He has participated in exhibitions, residencies and other projects in Ukraine and abroad.

Mikheil Sulakauri is an artist working in different mediums in order to echo his surroundings and environment. Since finishing school, he has focused on self-education and tried to create a modern artistic language based on Georgian traditions and culture.

In 2012, he made his debut on the Georgian art scene with the street art project LAMB. Aside from making art for public and gallery spaces, he is currently trying his hand as a designer for animation studios. Sulakauri’s beloved city of Tbilisi, with all its residents and ongoing issues, is the biggest canvas for his art.

Bogdana Voitenko is a Ukrainian psychologist and educator who has lived in the US, Canada, and the Russian Federation. For last three years, she has worked in museum education in Kyiv, Ukraine, developing programs for the National Center of Folk Culture (Ivan Honchar Museum), the Taras Shevchenko National Museum, and Pinchuk Art Center. Voitenko works primarily with children, helping young visitors to engage with different topics and prompting them to get to know each other better in order to develop their emotional and communicative intelligence. Her work invites participants to consider themes such as acceptance, tolerance, identity, and ecology, using art as an instrument to reveal and deepen viewers’ personal qualities. 

Voitenko has participated in cultural exchanges including the Ukrainian-German encounter “Living Monuments: Commemorative Spaces Between Removal and Re-invention” (2018), where participants analyzed how monuments influence the social environment and what claims they represent, culminating in a one-day exhibition at the Neurotitan Gallery in Berlin. She coordinated the children’s program for the second Festival of Living History in Kyiv (hosted by the NGO Insha Osvita), incorporating all their artwork into a collective magazine.

Olga Zovskaya is an artist originally from Russia who has lived and worked in Kyiv, Ukraine since 2015. She studied at the Ural State Academy of Architecture and Arts in Yekaterinburg, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Moscow, the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts and the Viadrinicum Summer School in Frankfurt (Oder).

Zovskaya initiated and organized the project Within Space in Yekaterinburg in 2014 and has taken part in numerous projects and shows in Armenia, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, the US, and elsewhere. Her writing on the current challenges of urban space has been published in the architectural magazine Tatlin.

As an artist with an architectural background, Zovskaya mostly works at the intersection of art and architecture. In her latest projects, she focuses on the memory of place, community engagement, and the relationship of the people to the place they inhabit, its space, and architecture. In particular, she is interested in ways in which the post-Soviet city reflects and reveals underlying political, economic, and social processes through its space, and in how it bears witness to the past and the current condition of society. She pays special attention to the fate of Soviet public spaces and monumental art.