Bio/CV
About
Zhanna Tsytsyn’s work exists at the intersection of personal history, myth, and the natural world. 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. Her paintings are shaped by this layered, multicultural experience—a life lived between places, languages, and identities.
This sense of in-betweenness, of belonging everywhere and nowhere, has attuned Tsytsyn to questions of identity, displacement, and the subtle ways environment shapes consciousness. Her work is both autobiographical and allegorical, forming a visual language that bridges personal memory with collective themes such as womanhood, ecology, religious trauma, and the search for spiritual and emotional autonomy.
Working primarily in oil paint, earth pigments, clay, and foraged plant materials, Tsytsyn’s practice is intuitive and tactile. Each piece emerges through an organic process guided by memory, texture, light, and materials gathered from the land. Figures dissolve into landscapes, symbols surface and fade, and the human and natural worlds hold equal presence. These dreamlike compositions become contemplative spaces, part myth and part memory, where internal and external worlds meet.
Her female subjects often carry the weight of cultural expectation, yet they remain deeply interior, forming quiet relationships with each other and with the world around them. In these subtle interconnections, Tsytsyn gestures toward a liberated selfhood, one that exists beyond societal prescriptions and is rooted instead in communion with nature, spirit, and the wild unknown.
Informed by her own journey through and beyond religious indoctrination, Tsytsyn’s recent work explores themes of inner truth, clarity, and the enduring mystery of being. Through her art, she invites viewers into a space of stillness and reflection, a return to the earth, the body, and the elemental forces that shape us all.
Education
2008 - BA - Painting, Drawing and Printmaking
Portland State University, Portland, OR
2004 - The Art Institute of Portland
Select Exhibitions
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