alina nazmeeva
Alina Nazmeeva is a Tatar-american artist, architect and educator working with physical installation, digital simulation, and speculative game design to investigate the spatial, material, and political implications of technologies and infrastructures, both emergent and established. Her practice is driven by a central question: what emerges when technology is understood not as an abstract toolset, but as a spatial, historical, and political medium—one that organizes how bodies move, how spaces are imagined, and how certain futures come to feel inevitable? Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Architecture + Design Museum in Los Angeles, the Beall Center for Art + Technology, SIGGRAPH and ISEA, and in major art and design festivals such as DA Z (Zurich), Slamdance (Los Angeles), HKWalls (Hong Kong), Collectible (NYC and Brussels), Maison Objet (Hong Kong), and Alcova Milano. She has presented at Harvard GSD, Parsons, Duke University, Shanghai Institute of Visual Art, Seoul National University. She holds a Master’s degree from MIT SA+P and was awarded fellowships at Art Omi, University of Michigan, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Strelka Institute and Monira Foundation. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Computation at UIUC School of Architecture, where she directs DIS/PLAY Lab.
Her installation Bug in My Software, juxtaposes handwoven textile landscapes with AI-driven ecosystem simulations, questioning the relationship between manual and automated labor, human and non-human intelligence. Pre-game shifts focus to embodiment and spectatorship, using football culture as a lens to investigate gender, bodies, and digital multiplicity. In Pre-Game, by merging physical objects with an XR essay, Alina in collaboration with Yvette Granata probes how digital bodies and spaces both reinforce and challenge societal norms. With surface, John Wagner and Alina interpret how digital media, CGI, and interlacing extended realities shape, make, and re-make our physical world, into a series of functional art objects. Alina’s augmented reality installation currents commissioned by Future Arts Seattle, invites visitors into a salmon run superimposed on the landscape once fertilized with the salmon in a unique interspecies interdependence of the broader ecosystem of Pacific Northwest and Seattle.