b. 1988, Vladivostok

Dina Leonova is a Belarusian artist living in Warsaw. In 2011 she received her MFA in Minsk and worked as an architect in Moscow for a year, while in 2013 she returned to Minsk, raised her child and started working as a graphic designer. Since 2015, DINKA has been consistently practicing watercolor painting, despite professional commitments and radical life changes: forced emigration from Belarus in 2021 due to the political situation, moving to Kyiv and later evacuating to Warsaw in 2022.

After the start of the war in Ukraine, she began creating self-portraits as an attempt to put herself back together and a smooth continuation of her art practice. It was also at this time that she began creating larger formats to take a step forward in her work and to differentiate them from her earlier works. Her watercolors are spontaneous and multi-layered, which alludes to the complexity of human identity. The hybrid figures she paints are a metaphor for the migrant experience, of being seen as the Other. On the other hand, she compares immigration to amputation, the loss of an important part of oneself.

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DINKA was recently the holder of a scholarship from the prestigious Chevening program enabling her to study at the Royal College of Art in London.