Anna Kovina is an interdisciplinary artist who transforms light, sculpture, and space into co-creative installations. Her experimental practice weaves together ancient craft traditions and contemporary technology to highlight the beauty of less seen lived experience—the kind not featured on social media, but that matters most.
Anna's work emerges from an intuitive dialogue between materials and body. She hand-cuts bright wool into spontaneous forms—some remaining textile, others transformed into bronze or glass through a reimagined lost-wax process. She uses shadows of these forms as formative tools, drawing from principles of drawing, astronomy, and psychology.
Through photography, she filters our relationship to ourselves, time, place, and scale through light.
In her large-scale installations, light becomes a living medium vibrating between body and object, parsing out the physical sense of presence and materiality. She invites direct interaction and playful discovery to reveal the pleasure of full-body engagement—
perhaps the most essential element of her practice.
Anna Kovina was born in Moscow and raised in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where she developed early passions for visual arts and rhythmic gymnastics. She immigrated to the United States in 1995 at the age of 17, where she subsequently earned degrees in finance and law, leading her to practice law in Palo Alto, California.
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In 2021, Anna relocated to Richmond, Virginia, where she began studying sculpture at VCUArts. She discovered glass-forming and other studio practices that aligned with her interest in material exploration and high-temperature processes. She earned her BFA in Sculpture + Extended Media and continues developing interdisciplinary work, creating sculptures from fiber, metal, and glass, dispersing them into light beams, and opening them to interpretation through improvisational movement.
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Anna has received significant recognition, including Dean's Best in Show at VCU's 2024 Juried Undergraduate Exhibition and the Vikki Katel Memorial Scholarship. Her research has been supported through VCU grants examining feminist art practices and the social psychology of childbirth. She has been awarded a fellowship at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts at Mount St. Angelo in Amherst, Virginia, and selected as an artist in residence by KALA Art Institute in Berkeley, California in 2025.