Hello, and thank you for visiting.

As much as I prefer to make art rather than talk about it, I do agree it’s nice to know a little bit about an artist. I am originally from Plovdiv, Bulgaria and lived there till I was 10. I immigrated to the US in 1980, during the Cold War. I got my undergraduate degree in Art from Yale in 1992, and subsequently spent a year on a Fulbright researching contemporary art in post-communist Bulgaria; I got my MA in Printmaking at the University of Iowa in 1997 and an MFA in Visual Art at Columbia in 1999. I currently live and work in Portland, Maine.

I am a multidisciplinary artist. I like to discover the medium appropriate for expressing a particular idea, and like to let a body of work speak in its preferred language. My most recent work is three-dimensional, and made in porcelain. In the past, I have been lucky to be able to realize my work in drawing, printmaking, painting, installation and performance, sculpture and assemblage, photography, and artists’ books. As I time allows, I will add more work to the gallery section of this website.

I have been fortunate to live, study, and work in multiple countries and under contrasting politics. Moving among cultures and different forms of government has shaped my perception of reality and and has let me pose questions to our collective beliefs- especially as to what we might accept as “normal” in our lives. I have always observed my surroundings keenly, and made work about what I see. I’m often struck by the interconnections between the animate and inanimate inhabitants of our world, and treasure being slightly unsettled by the unexpected. I feel that we’re all unique assemblages in our own right - formed of disparate pieces, filled with vast and conflicting memory, and shaped by winds we cannot predict or control. Nevertheless, we are all quite strangely beautiful.

Victoria Kostadinova 2024