Nelli Kam Chupin — Triple Life
artist
Nelli Kam Chupin
Before she ever drew a poster, Nelli Kam Chupin was coding radiation readings for satellite physicists — a maths degree and a computer-science habit of mind that never quite left her. She grew up moving between alphabets, and today moves between English, Georgian, French and Serbian with the same ease; her poster practice treats the world's writing systems the way a linguist treats grammar, not decoration but structure to bend. She has lived in several countries and is now based in Belgrade, with a second foothold in Tbilisi; along the way she trained at the Plantin Institute, University of Antwerp, at a type design school and at several poster schools, including Peter Bankov's.
The recognition has stacked up fast: Gold and Bronze at PosterStellars 2023, third prize at the International Poster Biennale in Lublin, a Communication Arts Design win in 2026 for the Bankov Poster School's Times Square anthology, and more than fifty selections across thirty-odd biennials spanning Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Middle East, from Lahti and Tokyo TDC to Madrid Gráfica, the B.I. Poster Biennale in Korea, the Ecuador Poster Bienal, the Emirates Poster Festival and Sofia's Stage Poster Triennial. Her series Poster4Peace, City Speaks and a run of jazz posters circulate alongside Goshuri, an experimental typeface of her own that made the pages of Slanted's Experimental Type issue; her work has also appeared in Slanted's “Posters Can Help” and in biennale catalogues.
Off the page she keeps building rooms for other people's obsessions: a club where members practise fourteen languages at once, the co-organised Poster Every Day, Tbilisi Posters — her project of posters and curated shows in the Georgian capital — the B44 space she runs in Belgrade, and the Formula art group and this very gallery, both co-founded by her. Influence, for her, shows in what grows up around a person, not just on their own wall.
Why we like it: she runs a gallery, a club that argues in fourteen languages, and a jazz-poster habit, and none of it seems to compete for the others' attention.
