Paulina Siniatkina

artist, activist,
TB survivor and advocate​

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Paulina Siniatkina is an artist and activist who works with a form of autobiographical reflective research. Her socially-oriented practice is driven by her own survival of tuberculosis (TB) in 2015 and is dedicated to fighting stigma and rethinking what is considered conventional. She is an author of Hold your breath, a series of paintings that were made during her seven months of isolation in a TB hospital in Moscow. In 2016 Paulina was one of the 20 founding members of TB People, a global network of people affected by tuberculosis. In 2017, she initiated, curated and illustrated the project Tuberculosis and You, an easy-to-read guide for people experiencing tuberculosis. The booklet was launched during the UN High-Level Meeting on TB in New York in 2018 and has since been translated into 13 languages. In 2024, Paulina received The Stop TB Partnership Community Award for her impactful work in addressing TB stigma through art. 

 

Paulina graduated as a monumental painter from the Moscow State Academic Art Institute named after Surikov (Russia, 2013) and holds a Master's degree in socially engaging arts from ArtEZ University of The Arts (The Netherlands, 2023). She lives and works in Amsterdam.

 

Her works are in the collections Stop TB Partnership (Geneva), the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute (Boston), Oxford Immunotec (London), FIND (Geneva), The Moscow Times (Amsterdam), MaxArt Foundation (Moscow) and private collections.​​