About
Alina Nazmeeva is a designer, digital artist and an educator. She is the A. Alfred Taubman Fellow at University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
Alina is a graduate of Master of Science in Urbanism, MIT (2019); a fellow of the New Normal program at Strelka Institute of Media Architecture and Design (2017), and a Canadian Centre of Architecture fellow (2022). She was a lead researcher at MIT Future Urban Collectives Lab, working on design for physical and digital spaces for emerging collectives, and a researcher at MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab, studying the economies of virtual worlds and prototyping urban-scale digital twins. She taught at Rhode Island School of Design and Boston Architecture College. She was an invited speaker and a critic at MIT SA+P, Harvard GSD, UBC and Politecnico Di Milano. Her most recent work was exhibited at the 2021 Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2022 Art on the Marquee in Boston and at 2022 Augment Seattle. Her writing has been published in PLAT, Media-N, CARTHA Magazine, Perspectives, VOICES(Towards other Institutions), Harvard Real Estate Review (forthcoming).
In her work Alina examines entanglements and overlays between physical and digital spaces and objects, and their cultural, economic and political implications. Using gaming engines, CGI software, machinima, found footage and installations, she exposes and examines the increasing oscillation between cities and videogames, images and spaces, life and animation. A research-based and narrative-driven approach is fundamental to her work as she often combines visual art projects with writing. With a background in architecture and urbanism, she refuses binaries of physical/digital, or virtual/real, and instead investigates the continuities, gray zones and points of friction between these notions. Alina has love-hate relationships with the internet and digital spaces. This emotional ambiguity inspires her to continue to examine the wonders and horrors of the digital, and how it reassembles the ecological, urban and social systems and spaces.
