Nina Gurianova, Guest Speaker

Nina Gurianova is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. An art historian and scholar of Russian and European modernism, her work explores the intersections of aesthetics and politics, with particular attention to the Russian avant-garde and the fertile exchange between literary and visual culture.

Gurianova’s scholarship examines the radical artistic experiments that emerged in Russia during the years surrounding the Revolution, when painters, poets, writers, musicians, and theatre artists challenged established distinctions among artistic forms. Her first monograph, Exploring Color: Olga Rozanova and the Russian Avant-Garde, established a major study of the pioneering Russian Futurist artist while illuminating the close relationship between painting and poetry. Her subsequent book, The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde, investigates the philosophical and political impulses underlying the pre-revolutionary avant-garde and received the AATSEEL Award for Best Book in Literary and Cultural Studies.

Gurianova has also brought her expertise to major international exhibitions. She served as a primary curatorial consultant to the Museum of Modern Art for its exhibition of Russian Futurist and Constructivist books. She has contributed to exhibitions including Amazons of the Avant-Gardeand the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Kazimir Malevich.

Gurianova’s work reveals the Russian avant-garde not simply as a collection of new styles, but as a larger reimagining of artistic possibility, an atmosphere of experimentation, provocation, and creative freedom that also shaped the cultural world in which Sergei Prokofiev developed his unmistakably modern musical language.