Bio/CV
About
Zhanna Tsytsyn is a Pacific Northwest - based multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the hidden structures connecting human experience to the wider cosmos. Born in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, and raised between her father’s Russian homeland and her mother’s roots in Kobuleti, Georgia, she immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. This layered cultural upbringing informs a practice deeply attuned to questions of identity, belonging, and the universal threads woven through our shared human experience.
Through painting, sculpture, and mask-making, Tsytsyn creates luminous worlds where earthly and celestial realms intermingle, and every element carries its own quiet intelligence. Her process is intuitive, guided by texture, memory, light, and a deep relationship with nature and wild and remote landscapes. Working with oils, clay, ash, sand, soil, earth pigments, and foraged botanical materials, she builds richly layered surfaces and symbolic narratives shaped by pattern, rhythm, music, and automatism. Field studies, metaphysical research, folklore, and personal mythology serve as catalysts for visual stories that unfold between the seen and unseen.
At the heart of Tsytsyn’s practice is a desire to dissolve hierarchies between species, elements, and ways of being. Figures merge with their surroundings, symbols emerge and recede, and natural forms hold equal presence to human ones. Her compositions function as dreamlike spaces - part narrative, part elemental - where time and place become fluid. Acting as windows, mirrors, and living myths, her works invite moments of contemplation and recognition between body, earth, and cosmos, offering a deeper connection to the forces that shape both personal and collective futures.
Education
2008 - B.A., - Painting, Drawing and Printmaking
Portland State University, Portland, OR
2004 - The Art Institute of Portland
Select Exhibitions
2026 - Where Roots Refuse Borders - Solo Exhibition, One Grand Gallery, Portland, OR
2026 - Flow Exhibition - Group Show, Naturalist Gallery of Contemporary Art, New York, NY
2025 - Ford Gallery PDX - Group Show, Portland, OR
2025 - Art at the Cave Gallery - Group Show, Vancouver, WA
2025 - Clark County Open Studios, WA
2025 - Portland Open Studios, OR
2025 - Soil, Culture, and the Invisible Structures of Belonging - Group Show (3 artists), Art at the Cave Gallery
2025 - Seattle Art Fair - Blind Insect Gallery, Seattle, WA
2025 - Primordial Sounds - Group Show, The Residency, Portland, OR
2024 - Art at the Cave Gallery - Group Show, Vancouver, WA
2024 - Identity Crisis - Group Show - Ethereal Reflections, Portland, OR
2024 - Clark County Open Studios, WA
2024 - Portland Open Studios, OR
2024 - Spirit/Nature - Solo Show (2 artists), Rebecca Anstine Gallery, Vancouver, WA
2023 - Art at the Cave Gallery - Group Show, Vancouver, WA
2023 - Clark County Open Studios, WA
2023 - Portland Open Studios, OR
2023 - The Matters of Origins - Solo Show , La Casita Cultural Center, Vancouver, WA
2022 - We Are Reversal - Group Show, Palazzo Pisani-Revedin "Rossini", Venice, Italy
2022 - Blind Insect Gallery - Group Show, Portland, OR
2022 - La Casita Cultural Center - Group Show, Vancouver, WA
2022 - Rebirth - Group Show, Le Jardins Des Arts, New York, NY