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Artists

Anton Shlyonkin is a designer, art director and teacher now based in Bangalore, India, with a career built across branding, motion type, and design education. He has worked as an expert in communication design and branding at Yandex, served as Creative Director at All My T, and lectured at the National Design Institute in Moscow — carrying a hands-on, workshop-driven approach to type and identity into the classroom. His navigation-and-wayfinding design work for the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics’ SANKI sliding centre put his systems thinking to a genuinely high-stakes, high-traffic test.

Shlyonkin’s poster-adjacent work runs through Typomania, Russia’s motion-type and typography festival, where his contributions include motion type for the 2020 edition; his Kinoglyph project, a personal collection of minimal, logotype-only reinterpretations of film titles; and side projects like a hand-illustrated Type Tarot deck and the free French Forge display typeface. His packaging project “5 Principles” won a Gold A’ Design Award in 2017 — one of the most-entered design competitions in the world.

Why we like it: Shlyonkin treats a logotype, a wayfinding sign and a tarot card as the same design problem — proof that a good eye for type travels well outside the poster frame it usually lives in.

Tanya Kuznetsova is an illustrator and graphic designer whose work spans two distinct practices: children’s publishing and animation on one side, and a disciplined, ongoing poster practice on the other. Her illustration credits include artwork for Soyuzmultfilm’s animated productions, a Tretyakov Gallery book built around Arkhip Kuindzhi’s paintings, picture-book work for the Samokat publishing house, the children’s journal Batiskaf, and puppet-animation graphics for KIDDO TV — a body of work built for readers and viewers who notice everything.

Under the name Tihamet, she keeps a parallel poster practice fed by the “Poster Every Day” discipline, producing event posters — for club nights, literary-performance evenings, bicycle-day campaigns — and standalone typographic studies that push Cyrillic lettering into deliberately unstable, glitch-inflected territory. Her poster for a media-poetry performance event, built around a chorus of repeated cat portraits and dense event information, shows the same eye for structure that carries her book layouts.

Why we like it: Kuznetsova’s posters have the exacting hand of someone who draws for children’s books all day — nothing is there by accident, and everything is drawn, never just typed.

Katia Bligh is a self-taught illustrator and book designer based in Pasadena, California, whose work turns quirky characters, friendships and love into dense, hand-drawn worlds — patterned pink horses, sticker-sheet casts of small creatures, character portraits with just enough menace to be funny.

Her self-initiated cover redesign for "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass" won Category Winner in Book Covers at the 2023 World Illustration Awards' New Talent track, alongside a Highly Commended nod the same year for an imagined cold-brew tea packaging series in the Design Product & Packaging category — both un-commissioned pieces, made purely to sharpen a self-taught practice into a professional one.

Why we like it: Bligh treats an imaginary tea label with the same care as a classic novel's cover — proof that "quirky characters, friendships, and love" is a design brief for her, not just an Instagram bio line.

Anna Ganna is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and researcher of contemporary visual culture, running her own Formula studio and organizing Poster Every Day, an annual international poster exhibition she built from scratch — its 2026 edition brought together 74 posters from 60 participants across 21 countries, staged with partners GY2+NL, Brusnichny studio and Dprofile.

Her eye for the medium has made her a regular presence on international poster juries: she served on the INTERCON Jury for the Poster Stellars Intercontinental Poster Competition (USA, 2026), joined the jury of Bullseye's "Traditional Turkish Archery" art exhibition, and this year became a first-year jury member for the 7th International Poster Biennial BIAH in Bolu, Turkey. Alongside the curatorial work, she keeps her own poster practice alive — bold, typographic pieces built from cultural fragments and everyday material, made under the same conviction that drives her curating.

Why we like it: Ganna has spent her career on both sides of the poster — making it, and deciding, as a juror, what counts as good — which is exactly the vantage point a poster gallery needs a friend in.

Lena Slepushkina is a graphic designer and alumna of the Bankov Poster School, where her cohort-25 poster for an imagined "step into a world of dreams and music" concert already showed her signature move: dense, expressive brush lettering layered over halftone texture and digital noise, drawn as much as designed.

That hand gets put to real use, too — her poster for Morning Jazz, a live open-air saxophone session, ran through the same rough-edged calligraphy, a design as unpolished and alive as the event it announced. Between poster-school studies and real bookings, she keeps circling the same territory: hand lettering pushed to the edge of legibility, softened by scanner grain and pattern.

Why we like it: Slepushkina draws her type instead of setting it, and it shows — her posters look handled, like something that could still smudge if you touched them.

Nadia Diuu is a New York-based artist and designer known for a viral series of bold, single-line poster statements — stark color blocks and oversized type built to turn one blunt sentence into a whole worldview, made to be screenshotted and shared as much as looked at.

Beyond her own poster series, she co-founded Berloga, a Berlin-based project translating post-Soviet migrant life for a German audience — event guides, city-slang explainers and playful data-graphics that turn a complicated subject into something approachable, one flat color field and oversized headline at a time.

Why we like it: Diuu has one design move — a flat color field and a single oversized headline — and she trusts it completely, whether she's naming an unspoken feeling or explaining why an air conditioner is a novelty in Berlin.

Alena Linnask is a graphic designer and type designer based in Dessau, Germany, working at the intersection of typeface design, theatre and festival posters, and pattern-based textile projects. Her poster practice serves some of Europe’s most visible stages: she designed the poster for “People Places Things” at London’s Trafalgar Theatre, directed by Jeremy Herrin, and “Ursonate” at Berlin’s Deutsches Theater, alongside identity work for the Neorealismus Film Festival and other cultural events, building compositions that fold bold geometric shapes and razor-sharp type into something that reads clearly from a bus shelter and rewards a second look up close. Alongside posters, Linnask designs typefaces for type foundries including Schrifteria and The Type Founders (after earlier work with TypeType Foundry and as a designer at the Erarta Museum). Her typeface TT Espina, co-designed with Alina Molchanova, won a 2023 Indigo Design Award — one of the industry’s most competitive international type and design competitions — and her free release JUST Sans has passed 13,000 views on Behance, putting a genuinely useful, well-drawn sans into wide circulation for free. Why we like it: Linnask treats a poster and a typeface as the same problem at different scales — which is why her posters read like type specimens and her type reads like it was drawn for a poster.

Victor Tyapkov is a graphic designer who spends his days designing maps, interactive visuals and posters — often all three at once. His long-running poster series for Jazz Days, an international jazz festival, has quietly become part of the festival itself: type that swings, colour that behaves like a rhythm section. A companion series for a regional blues festival works the same instinct in a rawer key. Beyond jazz he has made exhibition graphics and maps for the GULAG History Museum — his most-viewed body of work on Behance — identities for the Arctic Open film festival and a project on the history of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, and a book about a felt-boot factory. He also founded and leads Plakat-Tsentr, an informal association of designers built on the idea that designers who know each other make a stronger professional community; through it he brings poster design, typography, illustration and calligraphy together for a shared audience. His portfolio work has been selected into Behance's Exhibition & Signage and InDesign galleries. Why we like it: he is precise the way a cartographer is precise, and the letters still get to dance.

Alisa Frolova is a multidisciplinary designer with more than nine years of experience across brand identity, marketing design, motion and 3D, now based in Lisbon. She currently works as Lead Marketing Designer at Career.io (the company behind Resume.io), where she has redesigned video graphics, refreshed the platform’s social media identity, and directed podcast visuals and AI-generated imagery. Before that she spent two years as Senior Graphic Designer and then Lead Marketing Designer at red_mad_robot, building internal communications, event design and merchandise for the studio, and earlier still designed event branding — including a high-profile fashion show — signage and in-store displays for DLT Department Store. By day she builds visual systems for digital products; posters are where she lets go. Her poster practice mixes rendered 3D forms (Cinema 4D, Octane, Blender) with expressive typography and layouts that refuse to sit still — she calls it a playground for creative freedom, and she submits regularly to international design contests. It is a productive collision: the same rendering rigor that keeps a product’s motion graphics legible at speed turns up in posters built more like sculpture than layout, part of a broader turn in the medium as designers trained in 3D and interface work bring studio-grade CGI into a form that used to live and die by print. An alumna of the Bankov Poster School, Alisa made “Bloom” for the school’s fifth-anniversary anthology of twelve motion posters, “no clients, no briefs, no limits,” which ran on Times Square’s digital billboards June 23–29, 2025, as part of Art Innovation Gallery’s “Twice Seen” exhibition — covered by PRINT Magazine’s Daily Heller column, People of Print and Fonts In Use, and since awarded a Communication Arts Award of Excellence (2026, Group Project). By her own account she has also picked up recognition at the Luga Poster Biennale and been featured at Forward Festival. Why we like it: Bloom is what happens when a product designer stops asking for a brief.

Anatolie Micaliuc is a product designer from Chisinau, Moldova, with eight-plus years in B2B software behind him. “I got into design by accident,” he says — he started out building landing pages and ad banners after the training center where he worked as an administrator closed down, and won one of ten free scholarship spots at an information-design school on the strength of his entrance assignment. He nearly quit a month before the diploma deadline; his teacher and mentor Artem Gorbunov, he says, “stepped in at the right moment, found the right words, and convinced me to return.” He owned design at GoParrot from its early stage through its acquisition by Square, driving 4x MRR growth along the way; today he leads design for Square’s Food & Beverage enterprise product across four teams. Posters are his other life. He deepened his typography and poster craft not through online courses but by studying directly under mentors — Sviat Vyshniakov in London and Peter Bankov in Prague — and now teaches typography himself at a design school back home, passing on the same one-on-one apprenticeship that shaped him. His posters are loud, typographic and unapologetic: set in Druk, “Creatiration” was his piece for the Bankov Poster School’s fifth-anniversary anthology on Times Square in June 2025, covered by PRINT Magazine’s Daily Heller column, People of Print and Fonts In Use, and since awarded a Communication Arts Award of Excellence (2026, Group Project). On craft in the age of automation he is unbothered: “History shows that with every wave of automation and technological progress, skilled craftsmen become more valuable. Originality, the pursuit of inner mastery, and love for the craft are hard to reproduce — and that’s one way to stay relevant in the age of AI.”

Anna Striuk is a multidisciplinary designer and art director in Miami, with more than five years of experience across agency and independent practice. Her client work is hospitality, culture and luxury — campaigns and brand identities for Fontainebleau (including its BleauLive entertainment brand, which has hosted acts like Lady Gaga and Calvin Harris), SLS, Baha Mar, Turnberry Isle Racquet Club, Harry Soffer Room and West Chelsea Contemporary — built, in her words, on strategic thinking and visual storytelling with a strong sense of place. Her range also runs commercial: a custom lettering campaign for a Nike retro line sits alongside the hospitality identities. She currently works as Senior Graphic Designer/Art Director at Hi-gloss in Miami, after earlier roles as Graphic Designer/Jr. Art Director at RFR Creative in Jacksonville and Marketing Designer at Outlast Life, also in Jacksonville. “Magic Playground”, animated with Ivan Buka, is what she made when the brief was removed entirely: her contribution to the Bankov Poster School fifth-anniversary anthology that ran on Times Square in June 2025, part of Art Innovation Gallery’s “Twice Seen” exhibition, covered by PRINT Magazine’s Daily Heller column, People of Print and Fonts In Use, and since awarded a Communication Arts Award of Excellence (2026, Group Project). A poster that behaves like a toy. Why we like it: the same designer who makes luxury look effortless clearly enjoys making a mess when nobody is paying.

Anastasia Temirkhan is a graphic designer based in Lugano, Switzerland, working in creative direction, identity and poster design for cultural institutions, coffee roasters and record labels across Europe, the Middle East and South Korea. Her posters are built from reduced shapes, patterns and typography drawn from art and everyday street encounters — a line becomes a waterfall, a circle becomes an opera season. Among her recent commissions is a poster for Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre production of “Legend,” directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, its cloud shapes and lettering drawn from Sergei Parajanov’s film “The Colour of Pomegranates” — one measure of how far a practice built on reduction and pattern can travel, from a Lugano lakefront festival identity to a European theatre stage. She trained at the Bankov Poster School in Prague under Peter Bankov, and counts Anna Kulachek and Mikhail Lychkovskiy among her mentors. She went on to Dafi Kühne’s Typographic Printing Program, a Weltformat Festival workshop, a Design Summer program in Hangzhou, and Poster Design Basel/AGI Congress. Her work has collected Graphis Platinum poster awards, Poster Stellars gold and silver medals, five Excellent Work selections at TDC Tokyo, a Golden Bee 16 selection, a bronze at the International Poster Biennial in Nanjing (2025), and multiple 100 Best Posters selections across Switzerland, Germany and Austria — a footprint that spans European, East Asian and Chinese poster circuits inside a few years. Her work has been featured in Design 360° Magazine, Brand Magazine, Brain Magazine, Bold Journey and People of Print, and in 2025 she lectured at ESAD Porto’s Semantic Shapes Conference. In 2025 she co-organised, with Mikhail Lychkovskiy, the Bankov Poster School’s fifth-anniversary anthology on Times Square, and made “Where ideas run free & wild” for it with motion designer Enrico Gisana: origami red horses and typography built around the Chinese characters 師傳 (“mentor”). The anthology has since been awarded a Communication Arts Award of Excellence (2026, Group Project). “I believe being a designer means living in a state of continuous voyage,” she has said. “Creative work at its best is a dialogue: between mentors, collaborators, viewers, cultures, and ideas.”

Ira Goryacheva runs Studio Baklazanas, a self-described nomadic design studio based in Vilnius, Lithuania, working with museums, theatres, festivals, publishers and universities on identity, posters, editorial, motion and the occasional silk scarf. The studio motto borrows from Paul Watzlawick: you cannot not communicate. Its own summary of the poster question is shorter: “We love making posters.” The studio has been active since at least 2011 and carries an unusually deep award shelf for a small nomadic outfit: a Red Dot “Best of the Best” (2013) and a further Red Dot Design Award (2018), two iF Design Awards (2022), a German Brand Award (2019), a Silver European Design Award, and additional recognitions from the Type Directors Club and Graphis — a haul that would be respectable for an agency ten times its size. Its “Keep My Words Forever” / “Save My Speech Forever” campaign and its “Save Shukhov Tower!” poster campaign were both prize-winning social-responsibility projects, covered by architecture and design press; its “New Moscow” map, done with the Center of Russian Avantgarde, plotted more than 180 endangered Constructivist buildings and pushed poster-style information design into architectural preservation. The same sensibility travels well beyond paper: “The Great Utopia,” marking the Shukhov Tower’s 95th anniversary, and the limited-edition “Maneki Blues” — auctioned at Dutch Design Week in 2015 — turned poster-grade graphic thinking into silk scarves, alongside a “ME-SHU” scarf series and a commission for Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. For the Bankov Poster School fifth-anniversary anthology on Times Square (June 2025) she contributed a poster under the working title “Mess is more” — shown in our programme as “Visual Anarchy.” Either title fits: the work is dense, playful and deliberately overloaded, a cultural-institution designer letting the grid go. Why we like it: it looks like a festival programme that escaped.

Peter Bankov was born in Minsk in 1969 to an artistic family — his father, a Belarusian painter who left behind a career designing heavy machinery for fine art, is the influence Bankov points to first. He studied sculpture at Minsk Art College (1988), then book design and illustration at the Moscow State Polygraphic Institute (1993), and now lives and works in Prague, Czech Republic. He is a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale), founder and longtime editor-in-chief of the design magazine [kAk) — a reference point for an entire generation of Russian graphic design — and the author of 2,056 posters and counting: expressive collage, experimental type, nothing polite. “I’m a poster-making robot,” he has said of the pace. His work is held by MoMA, the Louvre, the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, the Stedelijk, the Klingspor Museum, MOTI, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and the poster museums of Lahti and Toyama, with private collectors holding his work from Moscow to London to Beijing. He designed the World Design Day poster for ico-D five times running (2016–2020), and has picked up awards across the major poster circuits: a Silver Medal at the 29th Warsaw International Poster Biennale (2025, for “Kremuliator”), a Grand Prix at the Asian Graphic Design Invitational Exhibition in Seoul (2014), Jury Prizes at the Golden Bee Biennale in Moscow (2014, 2018), Gold at the Italian Poster Biennial in Finale Ligure (2015), Platinum awards from the Graphis Poster Annual in New York, and a Red Dot Design Award for “War No More” — a poster series marking the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War that pairs fragments of wartime poems with gouache portraits drawn from his own childhood memories of veterans. He is the author of the 2013 collection “I Make Posters Every Day,” and was profiled as a Graphis Master under the theme “Design is Happiness” in Graphis Journal #376. Five years ago he started the Bankov Poster School in Prague. Almost every artist in this series went through it — proof, if any were needed, that a single teacher working out of one studio can still set the visual vocabulary for poster design well beyond his own borders. In June 2025 twelve of its alumni put an anthology of motion posters on the screens of Times Square under the title “No Clients. No Briefs. No Limits.” — a tribute to a teacher whose values they describe as a love of aesthetics, a sense of humour and the freedom to be weird. “To me, design is like meditation,” Bankov has said. “The path of design is a hard one, but a happy one. You don’t do it because of the desire to become famous or rich.” And: “With design, your life will never be boring.”

Elena Byalaya is an information designer, graphic designer and illustrator based in Queens, New York. Her early work was book-shaped: guidebook illustration, editorial layout and typographic projects, including illustration for Kommersant/Nauka and MOLL magazine, and a self-initiated Cyrillic type project. That background in structured, information-heavy work still shows in what she makes now — posters built by someone who learned to make information legible before she learned to make it loud. Her typographic posters have been picked up independently by three separate poster-watchers — Design You Trust, typo/graphic posters and Another Graphic — the latter cataloguing her recurring palette of black and a deep magenta as a visual signature distinctive enough to be worth cataloguing. The same instinct carries over into commissioned work: a poster for a Queen Margaret University acting showcase was reposted by typo/graphic posters as a standout piece of student-theatre design. Her Behance archive, active since 2013, traces the arc from illustrated guidebooks to the layered typographic posters she is known for today. “Overlapping Realities”, set in Onlysans and animated by Seo Hyojung, was her piece for the Bankov Poster School fifth-anniversary anthology shown on Times Square in June 2025 — a poster built from layers that argue with each other, type that behaves like a map. Why we like it: it is a poster about living in two places at once, made by someone who does.

Yuliya Ratnikova is a London-based designer, design director at the branding agency Ascend Studio, with a personal practice in experimental typography, posters and print. Her posters build on “experiments with textures, overlays, various effects, and the use of bold colours,” and her working method matches the description: she carries a portable scanner to capture interesting surfaces, and collects small design objects — fruit stickers, beer coasters — the way other people collect anything else. “I love finding interest in the things most people walk straight past,” she told Design Week. Her personal work has shown at the Warsaw International Poster Biennale, Forward Festival and the Intercontinental Biennale, and been collected in print anthologies including Bounty Hunters Posters, Slanted: Posters Can Help, and Experimental Type 2.0. Poster Every Day regulars know her from “Bear with Me”: a life-sized bear hand-stitched from 104 recycled exhibition posters and roughly 10 cubic metres of discarded plastic bottles, made with Anna Ganna in late 2023 and later shown at Forward Festival Berlin. “This project isn’t just about recycling posters. It’s about rethinking what we left behind as designers.” As a design leader she talks about separating ego from the brief, building judgment beyond taste, and “structuring creative chaos” without losing the unprocessed, curious energy that makes early ideas good — a worry she has about designers who reach for software and trend before they’ve developed a point of view of their own. It’s the same habit that made her a subject of Design Week’s design/leader series in the first place: a working method built on collecting road signage, care labels and IKEA manuals reads, on the page, less like a quirk than a genuine design skill — noticing what everyone else has been trained to screen out, then building a brief around it. “Creative Potential”, animated with Tanya Ermolaeva, was her piece for the Bankov Poster School fifth-anniversary anthology on Times Square in June 2025. Her advice to younger designers is as spare as her posters: “Strip it back and don’t over-process.”

Anastasia Nechiporenko comes to posters from the screen: her background is UI/UX, web and interaction design, with concept projects for fashion and editorial brands. On Behance, where she has racked up more than 67,000 project views and 6,100 appreciations since 2019 across ten published projects, her strongest-performing work redesigns elegant digital interfaces for names like Cecil Beaton, Vogue UK, Katami Wear and Southern Cold — the Katami Wear concept alone drawing more than 35,000 views. She has also worked in print and editorial design, with a redesign concept for “Felix Beato. Journey to the East” and the book project “Lyfjaberg” — clean structures built for brands and subjects that already know exactly who they are. That habit of thinking in systems shows in her poster work too — the same clean structures, but suddenly breaking into something personal. “Creative DNA” was her piece for the Bankov Poster School fifth-anniversary anthology on Times Square (June 2025), animated together with motion designer Vyacheslav Vaganov and set in CoFo Sans VF. The anthology — twelve alumni posters, “no clients, no briefs, no limits” — ran on Times Square’s digital billboards as part of Art Innovation Gallery’s “Twice Seen” exhibition, was covered by PRINT Magazine’s Daily Heller column, People of Print and Fonts In Use, and has since picked up a Communication Arts Award of Excellence (2026, Group Project). It is a rare poster credit for a designer whose day job is interfaces, not print — evidence that a systems-first, UI-trained eye translates cleanly into a single frame. A poster about what makes a designer a designer — the part you cannot outsource. Why we like it: it treats identity the way a lab treats a sample — with curiosity, not vanity.

Mikhail Lychkovskiy was a bank IT analyst until his thirties. Born and raised in Minsk, Belarus, he studied computer science and economics and spent seven years as a systems analyst bridging business and software development before he stopped. “I couldn’t be an analyst anymore. I became a designer.” He retrained at the British Higher School of Art & Design and Peter Bankov’s poster school — reportedly teaching himself by analysing 100 to 300 design works a day — and today lives and works in Batumi, Georgia. His typographic posters attack Swiss and French design traditions with markers, acrylic paint, tired brushes, broken toothpicks, and metal and wooden letters, and range from posters and book covers to concert posters for the German band Diorama and event graphics for TypeThursday Tbilisi. He cites Josef Müller-Brockmann, Armin Hofmann, Emil Ruder and Karl Gerstner alongside Dafi Kühne’s letterpress work as reference points, and describes starting most pieces from a typeface: “My dish typically starts with a typeface — whenever a font catches my eye, something mischievous stirs in me.” More recently the same materials-first instinct has migrated off the wall entirely, onto book covers, bar coasters, rally-car liveries and beer-can packaging — proof, if any were needed, that a poster sensibility travels. The awards list is long: wins and selections at the Golden Bee Biennale (2024 winner plus an honorable mention), the China Poster Biennial, a further jury prize at the China International Poster Biennial’s “Seeding the City” exhibition, Graphis Poster Annual (Gold 2022, Silver 2025), Poster Stellars, a TDC New York Certificate of Typographic Excellence (2022), a Peru Design Biennial win (2022), BIPB Korea and HEHU International. He has served as a juror for the United States International Poster Biennial (2025) and Poster Every Day (2024), shown work in group exhibitions staged by PosterTerritory in Los Angeles, and held solo shows in Batumi (2022) and, in March 2026, at Panda Platforma in Berlin — a jury sheet and an exhibition record broad enough to make the case that Swiss-tradition rigor and Georgian-toothpick improvisation can carry a single poster to Seoul, Lima and Berlin in the same year. In 2025 he co-organised, with Anastasia Temirkhan, the Bankov Poster School fifth-anniversary anthology on Times Square, and made “Point of View” for it. “It’s about capturing the values Peter gave us,” he said of the project. His own manifesto is simpler: “I believe that the world will literally be more beautiful if there are more beautiful things in it.”

Olga Severina is a graphic designer and curator based in Los Angeles, with a Master’s degree in Graphic Design and Communications and a PhD in Visual Arts from the Kharkiv State Academy of Arts and Design, where she also taught design and visual thinking before relocating to Los Angeles in 2010. She grew up in Kharkiv’s creative community, and is the founder of PosterTerritory, a platform for socially engaged poster campaigns and exhibitions — Bauhaus 100, The New Winds: Iranian Contemporary Graphic Design, Seeding the City, Design for People at LA Design Festival, Design Futurism LA 2025 — and Senior Creative Director at Kandula Communications. She has taught at UCLA’s Design Media Arts department, been artist in residence at USC Roski, and spent years as a curator and selection-committee member for major international poster exhibitions, including The 4th Block (Ukraine) and the Golden Bee Graphic Design Biennale. She curated the Bankov Poster School exhibition through PosterTerritory, and in 2025 was part of the school’s fifth-anniversary anthology on Times Square. What began as a single poster show has grown, under her curation, into a recurring international circuit: PosterTerritory exhibitions and open calls have since travelled to galleries and festivals in Kyiv, Porto, Ljubljana, Taipei, Paris, Long Beach and Springfield, Missouri, carrying the argument — one gallery wall at a time — that a poster can still do civic work in an age of screens. That argument has drawn its own press: she has been profiled on the Not Real Art podcast and interviewed by VoyageLA, and it is not an unearned reputation but the sum of steady, unglamorous curatorial labor — call after call, show after show, since 2018. In 2023 she co-founded Rukh Art Hub in New York with Mariia Manuilenko, a nonprofit supporting Ukrainian artists that has staged twelve fundraising exhibitions and auctions, raising more than $600,000 since its founding. Through PosterTerritory she also launched the “Stand with Ukraine” poster call, mobilizing international artists around a shared cause. “The driving force behind PosterTerritory is my sincere belief that a truly compelling poster has the power to change the world,” she says. We are inclined to agree.

Nikita Gavrilenko is a graphic designer and photographer living in Tampere, Finland, originally from Astana, Kazakhstan. He holds earlier degrees in Aeronautical Engineering and Industrial Management and has pursued a Master’s in Visual Communication Design at Aalto University — a career pivot into design that echoes a few other artists in this gallery. He is a member of Grafia, the Finnish association for visual communication designers. His work moves between poster design, book covers, visual identities and photography, freelancing for cultural institutions, artists and researchers, with a recurring taste for the political and the typographic. Two of his posters, “Young Military Expert Cartoon Club” and “Rap Ambush,” were Poster Stellars 2023 finalists, alongside a third, “I Am F*cking Wasted” (Ecological category); two more, “Ich Bin Der Zorn Gottes” and “Omega VR Time Travel Company,” were Poster Stellars 2024 finalists. He was also shortlisted for the Young Creatives’ Award at Vuoden Huiput (Finland’s national design awards) in 2021, and paired with Japanese artist Nanako Ueda for “Poster Fighter,” a joint exhibition of posters inspired by medieval Asian warriors and martial arts, shown at Luonnos-ikkuna in Helsinki from January to April 2025 — a Kazakhstan-born, Finland-based designer and a Japan-born, Finland-based one, meeting in the middle on a shared visual language of combat and armour, which is as good a case as any for what a poster can do that a paragraph can’t. “Catching the Big Fish”, set in CoFo Kak and CoFo Sans Mono, was his piece for the Bankov Poster School fifth-anniversary anthology shown on Times Square in June 2025. Why we like it: it takes David Lynch’s line about ideas literally and goes fishing.

Nelli Kamaeva is a product designer who started making posters when interface work stopped leaving room for anything else — a self-set project of three hundred posters that turned into a practice. Before design, she trained in mathematics and worked as a programmer building software for physicists analysing spacecraft radiation; her later product-design career has spanned healthcare (Flow Health, Kromos Genetic Lab), education and blockchain products. “Somewhere between designing interfaces and watching metrics I’ve found myself not doing real design,” she has said of the pivot. “Poster is the best way to express creativity, but not fall into complete art.” The name of her poster studio, neli, means “slow” in Georgian. Her posters mix illustration, handmade type and analog leftovers, sorted on her site into Cold, Warm, Hot and Crazy. She studied at Peter Bankov’s poster school in 2021, and has since shown six posters at Typomania 2021 in Moscow, exhibited at Cloud9 terrace bar and, with a hand-cut typeface of her own called Frood, in Open Collab’s typeface exhibition — and been shortlisted for the B.I. International Poster Art Biennale. She has been a Poster Stellars finalist across multiple years, and has also shown work at the United States International Poster Biennial (USIP, 2023). Off the page, the same instinct for running more than one thing at once built the Lazy Language Club, a community she founded around the deliberately excessive idea of learning twelve languages simultaneously. She made “Triple Life” for the Bankov Poster School’s fifth-anniversary anthology on Times Square in June 2025. Why we like it: it is about running three lives at once and pretending it is one — which is also roughly how this gallery got started.