Biography

Yuliya Lanina is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, animation, sculpture, performance, and public art. Her work explores memory, displacement, trauma, and identity through imagined worlds that move between the playful and the unsettling.

Lanina’s work has been exhibited and performed internationally at venues including Artpace, MuseumsQuartier Vienna, the Blanton Museum of Art, Seoul Museum of Art, SIGGRAPH Asia, SXSW, and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Her honors include fellowships and residencies from Fulbright, Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Artpace. Her animation Gefilte Fish received Best International Short Film at the Tamuz Shomron Film Festival.

Lanina holds an MFA from Hunter College and is Associate Professor of Practice in Arts and Entertainment Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin.

Long bio
Yuliya Lanina is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, animation, sculpture, performance, and public art. She creates alternate realities in her works—ones based on sexuality, trauma and identity. Lanina arrived in New York in 1990 as a political refugee from Soviet Union.

Lanina has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including Cleveland Institute of Art (Cleveland, OH, 2013), MuseumsQuartier Wien (Vienna, Austria, 2021), Rabotaroom (Milan, Italy, 2023), Seoul Art Museum (Seoul, Korea, 2006), Patrick Heide Gallery (London, UK, 2011), SIGGRAPH Asia (Yokohama, Japan, 2009), Beijing Biennial (Beijing, China, 2009), Sara Nightingale Gallery (Sag Harbor, NY, 2024), Elizabet Ney Museum (Austin, TX, 2023), SXSW Interactive (Austin, TX, 2019), State Museum of Modern Art (Moscow, Russia, 2012). Her 2022 solo show at Xposed gallery on New York’s High Line was viewed by more than 1,000 people per day over four weeks.

Lanina performances have been featured in OUTSider Festival (Austin, TX 2021), Teatro Santa Ana (San Miguel De Allende, Mexico, 2019), Blanton Museum of Art (Austin, TX, 2019), Creative Tech Week (NYC, 2019), SEAMUS National Conference (Eugene, OH, 2018), and Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX, 2016).

The screening venues for her animations include Austrian Film Museum (Vienna, Austria, 2022), Project Arts Centre (Lithuania, 2019), Le Carreau du Temple (Paris, France, 2018), Museum of Contemporary Art (North Miami, FL, 2012), El Museo Cultural, (Santa Fe, NM, 2010), Museum Ludwig (Germany, 2007), and Global Art & Moving Images Awards, Strata Foundation, Pinsiö, Finland (2013). Lanina’s most recent animation Gefilte Fish won Best International Short Film at Tamuz Shomron Film Festival (2024) and an Honorable Mention at the Female Eye Film Festival (Toronto, Canada 2023).

Lanina’s professional honors include fellowships and scholarships from Artpace International Art Residency (San Antonio, 2023), Fulbright (Vienna, Austria, 2020), The Puffin Foundation (NJ, 2019), Yaddo (2011, 2022), Marble House Project (Vermont, 2017), Headlands Art Center (CA, 2013), and CORE Cultural Funding Program (Austin, TX, 2014-2022).

Recent speaking engagements include panel discussion on intergenerational trauma in collaboration with the Sigmund Freud Museum (Vienna, Austria, 2022), United Nations Human Rights Office (2021), The University of Applied Arts (Vienna, Austria, 2021), GIFF (San Miguel De Allende, Mexico, 2022), SXSW Interactive (Austin, TX, 2019), Texas State University (San Marcos, TX 2024), and Pomona College (Claremont, CA, 2023).

Lanina’s work was featured on the cover of Austin Chronicle (2023) and reviewed in Feminist Studies (2024), The Forward (2022), Glasstire (2020), Houston Press (2016), Australian Art Review (2010), Brooklyn Rail (2006), Art ReView (2001), Bloomberg News (2007), Beijing Today (2006) and other publications. Yuliya was listed among the “top 10 artists in NYC now” by Revolt Magazine and received an honorable citation from the New York State Assembly in 2013.

Lanina’s collaborative projects, for which she created visuals to be displayed alongside performances by dancers or musicians, have been presented at Kronos Quartet’s Festival (2021), San Diego Museum of Art (CA, 2018), National Museum the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania (Lithuania, 2015), Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Series, National Sawdust (Brooklyn, NY, 2015) and the New Museum Festival (NY, 2010). Her collaborators included performers like Kronos Quartet and violinist Johnny Gandelsman; composers Nina C. Young, José Martínez, Vladimir Rannev, Russell Pinkston, Sam Lipman and Yevgeniy Sharlat; choreographers Caron Eule and Andrea Ariel. Lanina's latest collaboration, the interactive ballet MoonFall, for which she created projection design was nominated for a B. Iden Payne Award for Outstanding Media Design (2024).

Lanina holds an MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from SUNY Purchase College. She is currently Associate Professor of Practice at the Department of Arts and Entertainment Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin.