Polina Isurin is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work unfolds across painting, installation, video, writing, and mixed media, bridging personal and collective realms of memory, identity, and cultural translation. Additionally, Polina has been teaching visual art courses to middle, high school, and college level students since 2012. She is currently an Ohio Teaching Artist through the Ohio Arts Council, and teaches at the Columbus College of Art and Design. Polina is both committed and interested in how creative and pedagogical practices can coexist.  

Artist Statement 

I am drawn to the spaces between worlds—literal, linguistic, cultural, and internal. Born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg, Russia), raised across Israel and the United States, my bicultural and bilingual upbringing has shaped an enduring inquiry: How do the remnants of memory shape our individual identities and collective narratives?

My art practice is concept-driven choosing media—whether painting, installation, writing, or video—that best articulates each project's soul. I explore “in-between” spaces: the edges of memory and language, moments of translation, and the territory of remnants that resist easy classification. In my installations—like Justice, Rootlessness, and Buried Secret (Obelisk for the Future)—I invite viewers into layered environments that unfold not only as visual experiences but also as memoryscapes, where hints of the past and residues of the present coalesce. My doctoral research, Where I Am From: Developing a Pedagogy of Memories through an Emergent Practice‑Based Self‑Study, weaves together my identities as artist, educator, and immigrant. Through memory-based self-study work, I make art and teaching indistinguishable, treating memory as both subject and generative method. My work is rooted in site-specificity, embodied narrative, and the belief that creativity and pedagogy are intertwined paths of inquiry and transformation 

In every piece, I return to memory—its fragility, ambivalence, and power. It is here I interrogate where I come from, how I belong, and how art and memory prepare us to teach, to learn, and to remember.