alina nazmeeva
Alina Nazmeeva is a Tatarstan-born media artist and educator. Her work integrates XR, AI, textile, physical installation, digital simulation, and gaming engines as storytelling devices and as sites of critique. With these diverse media, Alina creates complex worlds focused on how technologies, emerging and established, shape the ways of knowing, living and becoming for both humans and non-humans. Alina is Assistant Professor of Computation at Illinois School of Architecture. She holds a Masters degree from MIT School of Architecture and Planning. She was a fellow-in-residence at the University of Michigan (2022-24), researcher-in-residence at Canadian Centre of Architecture (2022) and at Strelka Institute (2017). Alina’s work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, FutureArts Seattle, Boston Cyberarts, Chicago Gamespace, the Architecture + Design Museum in Los Angeles, Beall Center for Art + Technology, and the festivals including Slamdance, DA Z, Sona and HKWalls (upcoming). She presented her work at Harvard GSD, UMPRUM in Prague, Politechnico Di Milano, SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 and ISEA 2025 (Forthcoming).
Her installation Bug in My Software, juxtaposes handwoven textile landscapes with AI-driven ecosystem simulations, questioning the relationship between manual and automated labor, human and non-human intelligence. Pre-game shifts focus to embodiment and spectatorship, using football culture as a lens to investigate gender, bodies, and digital multiplicity. In Pre-Game, by merging physical objects with an XR essay, Alina in collaboration with Yvette Granata probes how digital bodies and spaces both reinforce and challenge societal norms. With surface, John Wagner and Alina interpret how digital media, CGI, and interlacing extended realities shape, make, and re-make our physical world, into a series of functional art objects. Alina’s augmented reality installation currents commissioned by Future Arts Seattle, invites visitors into a salmon run superimposed on the landscape once fertilized with the salmon in a unique interspecies interdependence of the broader ecosystem of Pacific Northwest and Seattle.
Using digital tools as storytelling devices and as sites of critique, Alina tries to hijack, hack, and reimagine existing computational practices and their material manifestations, towards the project of other technological systems rooted in the ideas of cyberfeminism, cosmotechnics, and ecological thinking.