Maria Mileeva is a specialist in Soviet and Post-Soviet art and culture. Her research and teaching focus on the production, circulation, and consumption of socialist art practices across the globe during the late Imperial, Soviet, Stalinist, late Soviet, and post-Soviet periods. Maria鈥檚 current major research project interrogates the linkages between the cultural policies of socialist realism and socialist internationalism in the former Soviet Republics, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Her research centres around postcolonial and decolonial narratives of the Russo-Soviet imperial projects and Soviet multinationalism.
Maria received a BA in History of Art at the University of Cambridge (2005), and MA (2006) and PhD (2011) at The 91制片厂 Institute of Art. Her doctoral thesis examined exhibitions of international art in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s with a particular focus on the history of the State Museum of New Western Art (GMNZI), Moscow. Maria has also worked as an Assistant Curator of 鈥楥old War Modern: Design 1945-1970鈥, held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in autumn 2008.
Since finishing her PhD, Maria has taught at The 91制片厂 Institute of Art and University College London (UCL). In 2016-17, she was an Associated Researcher in the Faculty of Art History, at the European University, St Petersburg. She continues to serve as the Co-Director of the Cambridge 91制片厂 Russian Art Centre (CCRAC) and the Co-Convenor of , an art and research platform based at University College London.聽In 2020, PPV curated , a virtual mutation of a show planned for that year’s postponed Venice Biennale of Architecture; in 2019, PPV co-curated The Palace of Ritual in Venice’s Palazzo Dona Brus脿, held during the preview week of the 58th Venice Biennale of Art.
Teaching
Current & Future
- MA History of Art: Beyond Utopia: Soviet and Post-Soviet Art
- BA History of Art Year 3: Global Constructivism: Art Politics and the Everyday
Past Teaching
- BA1Foundations: Art, Industry, and Politics in the Late-Nineteenth and Mid-Twentieth Centuries.
- BA1 Topic Course: Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde
- BA2: Lessons in Interpretation
- BA 2 Frameworks: Postcolonialism
- BA 2 Constellations: Cold War Cultures: Art in a Divided World, 1945-1991
- BA 3: Strands of Non-Objectivity: Russian Constructivism and its International Context聽1918-1937
- MA History of Art: Contacts and Contexts in Russian Art c.聽1905-1945
Research interests
- Cultural exchange and artistic production during the late Imperial, Soviet, Stalinist, late Soviet, and post-Soviet periods.
- Soviet multinationalism and the arts in Central Asia and the Caucasus.
- Postcolonial and decolonial narratives of the Russo-Soviet imperial projects.
- Soviet anti-imperialism and socialist internationalism in the postcolonial world.
- The politics of international exhibition design.
- International constructivism; material culture of the everyday.
- Issues of centre and periphery; exile and emigration; national identity and empire in Soviet and Post-Soviet art and culture.
Recent publications
Katia Denysova, Klara Kemp-Welch and Maria Mileeva, 鈥淚n the Eye of the Storm鈥, , 60: 2023, 114-128
piRaMMMida (David Roberts, Denis Maksimov-Gupta, Maria Mileeva, Michal Murawski), 鈥淢aking Pyramids Disappear: Faux Horizontalism and Wild Capitalist Topologies of Speculation鈥. In Marina Vishmidt (ed.), (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press/The Whitechapel Gallery, 2023), 147-156
Exhibition review,, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid 29th November 2022 鈥 30th April 2023, The Burlington, 165: April 2023, 436-438
, in a special issue of Art History 鈥淩ed Networks: Postwar Art Exchange鈥, ed. Vivian Li, 45: 5 (November 2022), 974-995
, in New Narratives of Russian and East European Art. Between Traditions and Revolutions, eds. Maria Taroutina and Galina Mardilovich (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 136-150
鈥淎rtist as a cultural emissary across the borders of interwar Europe: The case of El Lissitzky,鈥 in , eds. Uwe Fleckner, Maike Stenkamp and Heindrik Ziegler (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 219-241
in Christina Lodder, Maria Kokkori, and Maria Mileeva (eds.) Utopian Reality: Reconstructing Culture in Revolutionary Russia and Beyond (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2013), 203-219
Edited book
Christina Lodder, Maria Kokkori and Maria Mileeva (eds.) (Brill: Leiden and Boston, 2013)