Elena Byalaya — Overlapping Realities
artist
Elena Byalaya
Elena Byalaya is a New York-based graphic designer whose independent practice centers on poster design, lettering, and typography. Her background is in information and editorial design, with early work spanning guidebook illustration, editorial layout, and typographic projects, including illustration for Kommersant/Nauka and MOLL magazine, as well as a self-initiated Cyrillic type project. That background in structured, information-heavy work still shapes how she approaches typography and visual language.
Her work comes from an interest in experimentation, using the poster as a space to move between design and art and to explore different ways of working with visual language. She starts with research into a theme, its texts and visual references, and then experiments with materials and techniques. Working across digital media, hand lettering, painting, photography, collage, and print, she explores the meaning and form of language, rhythm, legibility, and the point at which letters begin to function as images. She is interested in making work that makes people stop, question what they see, and find their own interpretations.
In 2025, her poster Overlapping Realities, animated by Seo Hyojung, was shown in Times Square as part of the Bankov Poster School fifth-anniversary project. Her typographic work has also been featured by Design You Trust, typo/graphic posters, and Another Graphic.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the International Poster Triennial in Toyama, Poster Triennial Trnava, BICeBé, and the United States International Poster Biennial, where she received a Gold Award.
