Jenn Brewin (University of Cambridge) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge and a member of Pembroke College. Her research, supervised by Dr Rosalind P. Blakesley, investigates the establishment of socialist realist painting in the Georgian SSR (part of the Transcaucasian SFSR 1921-39) in the 1920s and 1930s. She is particularly interested in exhibition and institutional histories and exploring power dynamics and interactions between the Soviet centre and periphery in the Stalin era. She graduated with a BA in Russian and History of Art from the University of Bristol in 2008 and completed her MA with the special option ‘Contacts and Contexts in Russian Art 1905-1945’ with Professor John Milner at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2011. She is interested in all aspects of Russian and Soviet art and has travelled widely in the former Soviet Union. Jenn also co-organised the second collaborative conference between CCRAC and Moscow Lomonosov State University, ‘Exhibit ‘A’. Russian art: Exhibitions, Collections and Archives’ at the Courtauld Institute of Art in March 2014.

Natalia Budanova (The Courtauld Institute of Art) is currently completing her PhD thesis Representers and represented: women in Russia’s war art and imagery, 1914-1917 at the Courtauld Institute of Art. As a member of CCRAC she has been organising a series of international conferences in collaboration with the Department of Art History of Moscow State University exploring various aspects in the studies of history of Russian art. Her publications include ‘“Women at work” in Rodchenko and His Circle (2011)’ and ‘Utopian Sex: the Metamorphosis of Androgynous Imagery in Russian Art’ in Utopia: Russian Art and Culture 1900-1989 (2013). She is now engaged in co-curating the exhibition of Russian First World War posters and photographs scheduled for autumn 2014 at the Gallery of Russian Art and Design (GRAD) in London. Her essay ‘Penetrating the men’s territory: Russian women artists, Futurism and the Great War’ for the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, vol. 5 is due to be published in 2015.

Nicholas Bueno de Mesquita is a doctoral candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art, working on Soviet architecture and its linkages with the west. His MA option at the Courtauld was ‘Contacts and Contexts in Russian Art 1905-1945’. He prepared (with Marie Collier) the catalogue for the 2011 Royal Academy exhibition ‘Building the Revolution’ (also shown in Barcelona, Madrid, and Berlin). He prepared the architectural section of the exhibition ‘Rodchenko and his Circle’ at Art Sensus in 2011. His contribution to the 2012 Utopia series of conferences at the Courtauld ‘Theo van Doesburg and Russia’ has just been published in Utopian Reality: Reconstructing Culture in Revolutionary Russia and Beyond (2013). He gave a paper at the 2013 ASEEES conference in Boston on the 1971 Hayward Gallery exhibition ‘Art in revolution’ and will give a paper at the 2014 ASEEES conference on Letchworth and Russia. His article ‘Karl Kraus, Oskar Kokoschka and the Prometheus Triptych’ was published in the Burlington Magazine in 2009. He received a first degree in modern history from Oxford and had a long business career before entering the Courtauld.

Dr Marie Collier was awarded her PhD at The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2016 for her dissertation titled ‘Visualising Socialist Construction: Soviet Architectural Photographs in Mass Printed Media c. 1928-1935’. For the 2018 academic year she is Teaching Associate in the History of Art Department at Cambridge. In 2017 she was the Sackler Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellow at the Courtauld, where she organised the international conference Fantasy In Reality: Architecture, Representation, Reproduction. While completing her PhD Marie was Research Assistant for the V&A Engineering Season which included the first retrospective exhibition on the life and work of Ove Arup as well as a new architectural commission, the Elytra Filament Pavilion, for the John Madejski Garden at the museum. She has taught undergraduate courses at The Courtauld Institute of Art and Arcadia University on subjects ranging from modern and postmodern architecture in London to the history of museums and critical theory. She has given papers at conferenced in the UK, Russia and the USA. Her current research focuses on the visual representation of architecture in the Soviet Union in the 1920s to 50s.

Sofia Gurevich is a collaborative doctoral candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Tate Modern. She received her MA from the Courtauld in 2015, during which she undertook the special option ‘Contacts and Contexts in Russian Art c. 1905—1945’, supervised by Dr Maria Mileeva. Earlier, in 2012, she also received a Graduate Diploma in the History of Art from the Courtauld. Her PhD research, supervised by Dr Klara Kemp-Welch (Courtauld) and Dr Matthew Gale (Tate Modern), is on early Soviet book design of the 1920s and 1930s, with a focus on the study of major institutions related to the country’s burgeoning publishing industry. As part of her collaborative degree, Sofia will assist the curators of the upcoming ‘Red Star over Russia’ exhibition at Tate Modern, which will showcase items from the renowned David King collection of Soviet printed media and photography. The exhibition is scheduled for November 2017 to coincide with the centenary of the October Revolution. For two and a half years prior to her MA, Sofia worked as a Junior Cataloguer at a London-based auction house that specialises in Russian art.

Dr Louise Hardiman is a specialist in Russian art and the history of British-Russian cultural exchange. Her PhD from the University of Cambridge, ‘The Firebird’s Flight: Russian Arts and Crafts in Britain, 1870-1917′, examined British engagement with Russian art and craft during the long nineteenth century, with case studies on Netta Peacock and Aleksandra Pogosskaia. She is currently adapting ‘The Firebird’s Flight’ into two monographs, and has received funding through a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and a grant from the Design History Society. Other projects have included organising an international conference at The Queen’s Gallery to accompany the 2019 exhibition ‘Russia: Royalty and the Romanovs’, as a result of which she is now preparing an edited volume on British-Russian courtly gift-giving and cultural exchange. Hardiman’s latest publications include: Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture (co-edited journal issue, 2019), Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives (co-edited book, 2017), The Story of Synko-Filipko and other Russian Folk Tales (translated book, 2019), and an article for The Burlington Magazine. Her consultancy and public engagement work includes: Empire of the Tsars: Romanov Russia with Lucy Worsley (BBC4, 2016); Russian collection tours for Dorich House Museum; co-convening a series of Russian decorative arts seminars at the V&A; and talks at the National Portrait Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and Watts Gallery Artists’ Village. Hardiman has degrees from the University of Oxford (BA Jurisprudence, 1989) and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London (MA Russian Studies, 2005).

Dr Maria Kokkori (The Art Institute of Chicago) is a research fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago. She received her PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 2008 where her doctoral thesis focused on the examination of works by Kazimir Malevich, Ivan Kliun and Liubov Popova c.1905-1925. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Courtauld Institute with a focus on Russian constructivist works by Aleksandr Rodchenko. During 2009-2011 she was a postdoctoral research fellow of the Malevich Society in New York. Her project investigated Malevich’s teaching at the Vitebsk Art School in Belarus between 1919 and 1923.  Her research interests and publications focus on making and meaning of the Russian avant-garde art, cultural exchanges between Russia and the West, technology, science and the arts in Russia of the 1920s, and Russian avant-garde museology. Author and co-editor of Utopian Reality: Reconstructing Culture in Revolutionary Russia and Beyond (2013), Maria is currently working on a book publication on Malevich and the Unovis group.  She is a member of the board of directors of the Malevich Society in New York.

Kamila Kocialkowska is a PhD candidate and CEELBAS studentship award holder at the University of Cambridge, co-supervised by Dr. P. Blakesley and Dr. E. Widdis. Her dissertation title is‘The Russian Avant Garde and Photographic Defacement under Stalin’. She completed her MA in Russian Art at the Courtauld Institute.

Dr Galina Mardilovich is the Acting Curator of Russian and European Art at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. A specialist in printmaking and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian art, Galina received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2013. She is currently writing a book on the development of Russian printmaking in the late Imperial period and, with Dr Maria Taroutina, co-editing and contributing to New Narratives of Russian and East European Art: Between Traditions and Revolutions (Routledge 2019). Her work has been published in Print Quarterly, Art History, and The Burlington Magazine, as well as in several edited volumes, including Networks of the Early Avant-Garde: Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in her Circle. Galina’s research has been supported by grants from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Philosophical Society, Getty Research Institute, Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and Francis Haskell Memorial Fund among others. In 2014, she was awarded the Mary Zirin Prize for independent scholarship by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.

Dr Natalia Murray was born in St Petersburg where she gained BA and MA in Art History at the Academy of Fine Arts before taking the PhD course at the Hermitage Museum. In 2015 she has been awarded PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her most recent book Art for the Workers. Proletarian Art and Festive Decorations of Petrograd. 1917-1920 was published by ‘Brill’ in May 2018. In November 2018 the Russian translation of her 2012 book The Unsung Hero of the Russian Avant-Garde. The Life and Times of Nikolay Punin was published by ‘Slovo’ in Moscow. At present she is an associate lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art and a senior curator. In 2017 she curated a major exhibition Revolution. Russian Art. 1917-1932 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. She is currently working on several exhibition projects in Moscow and Paris and writing her next book on women-gallerists in Imperial Russia. Her books and articles extend across the wide field of 19-20 century Russian and European art, and she has featured in films dedicated to the Hermitage museum and the Russian revolution and in programmes for BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. Natalia is also trustee of the Russian Avant-Garde Research Project – a UK-based charity which shares one of her aspirations to reduce the number of fakes on the Russian art market.

Ksenia Pavlenko is a PhD student at Cornell University and the CCRAC Website and Social Media Manager. She studies visual culture and image-making in Eastern Europe from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. She holds an MPhil degree in the History of Art from the University of Cambridge (2017), where she focused on the visual culture of Finland as a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire under the supervision of Dr. Rosalind Polly Blakesley. Ksenia completed her BA in the History of Art and English Literature at the City University of New York in 2013, and has presented her work at the Cleveland Museum of Art, University of York, and the All-Russia Museum of Decorative, Applied and Folk Art in Moscow. Ksenia has worked at a variety of nonprofits and arts organizations, including the International Center of Photography, Guggenheim Museum, and the American Federation of Arts.

Emily Roy is a PhD candidate in History of Art working on an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award between the University of Cambridge and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Her research concerns printed views of St Petersburg and explores questions of modernization, cultural exchange and innovation in Russian print culture. Her primary material is the Talbot Collection at the Ashmolean, a unique and little known resource of c.1000 prints dating from the early 18th to the mid-19th century. Previously she was a Curator at Waddesdon Manor (The National Trust, Rothschild Collections), specialising in applied and decorative arts. She completed her BA in History of Art at Oxford University in 2010 and her MA in Russian Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL in 2012.

Isabel Stokholm Romanova is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Dr Rosalind Polly Blakesley. She is currently based in Russia, where she is a visiting scholar at Moscow State University, to conduct long-term archival research funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Isabel studied Russian at the State Pushkin Institute in Moscow and went on to receive her BA from the University of Oxford (History, 2013) and MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art (History of Art, 2015), where her dissertation on Russian realism won the Director’s Prize. Her PhD research – entitled ‘Fathers & Sons? Uncovering Cross-Generational Relations in the Russian Art World, 1880-1923’ – reassesses the relationship between artistic generations in late imperial Russia. Her work focuses on two prominent members of the Peredvizhniki (Wanderers), Vasily Surikov (1848-1916) and Ilya Repin (1844-1930), reflecting on personal and professional exchange between these ‘old-guard’ proponents of realist painting and youthful members of avant-garde groups such as Mir iskusstva, the Union of Russian Artists and the Futurists. Isabel explores themes such as artistic training, salon culture and socialising, generational theory, the role of youth and old age in the art world, and the divide between artists’ public and private lives. Her research employs Digital Humanities methods to study artistic networks using Social Network Analysis (SNA), and spatially maps Russian artistic life in Moscow, St Petersburg and abroad using Geographic Information System (GIS) applications.