Elizaveta Berezina is a cultural historian whose work examines how artistic and craft practices are produced, classified, and valued across different institutional and political contexts. She completed her PhD in comparative history at Central European University in Vienna in 2025 with a dissertation on Soviet folk art industries, the institutions that supervised craft production, and the materiality of craft. From 2022 to 2025, she was a research associate at Leipzig University’s Institute of Art History, where she worked on a project reassessing naïve and self-taught art. She also contributed to the development of new theoretical and methodological approaches to the field, particularly through exhibition history. Her research interests include marginalized and non-canonical forms of artistic production, with particular attention to the cultural infrastructures that determine their (in)visibility and interpretation.
During her fellowship at KWI, Elizaveta will develop a publication project based on her doctoral dissertation. The project expands her research on Soviet craft institutions into a comparative study of the institutions that oversaw, advised, and organized craft production in selected state-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe after 1945. It traces the circulation of organizational models, expert knowledge, and craft-related policies across the socialist bloc and examines how craft became a field in which questions of authorship, creative labour, tradition, and artistic value were negotiated. Among the questions addressed by the project is the contested concept of collective creativity: how critics, administrators, and cultural institutions opposed individual authorship to ideas of collective labour, tradition, and cooperative authorship, and how these ideas shaped the production and circulation of crafts.