Biography
Alina Cristea is an artist-researcher working with photography and film, currently living and working in Brussels and Bucharest.
After living in different cities in Belgium and the Czech Republic, where she studied Photography and cultural studies, she became interested in her identity as a Romanian in Europe and in her hometown, Bucharest. This led to the research project "Bucharest. The City with One Inhabitant. The City-Me," which combines photography, sound, and text.
She is currently pursuing a practice-based PhD at KU Leuven and LUCA School of Arts in Belgium.
In 2016, she co-founded the duo collective DOI (which means two in Romanian), in which she experimented with different media and explored the dynamics of the duo with another visual artist (Ine Vlassaks).
Work
Alina's research interests lie at the intersection between literature and the visual arts with a focus on photography, questioning how photography and literature can influence each other without one of them being subordinate, adjacent, explanatory to the other one. Through her current research project on Bucharest, she aims to fill in gaps of knowledge about the city, joining conversations emerging from the different fields of literature, artistic research, archival study, civic activism, and also contributing to the imagery of the contemporary city through photography, sound recordings, and text.
Some of her works are part of the distribution network of Argos - centre for audiovisual arts and of Kunst in Huis.
FEATURED IN
- Igloo Magazine, 2024
- RO AREAL (online), 2023
- FORUM+ vol. 30 no. 1-2, 2023
- Repository. 49 Methods and Assignments for Writing Urban Places, nai010 publishers & TU Delft, 2023
- GRUPAJ , Pilot issue, 2022
- THE ARCHIVE HOTEL, Issue no. 2, 2019
- KAJET. A Journal of Eastern European Encounters, Issue no. 2, 2018
- Le Monde / Design, 2018
- Domus Italy, 2018
- IDEAT Contemporary Life, 2018
- PRAMEN (Katalog Ateliéru fotografie), 2018
GRANTS AND AWARDS
- Talent development grant, Flemish Government, 2024
- Impulse project, LUCA, 2020-2022
- Roger Dillemans Award, KU Leuven, 2020-2021
- Project grant for DOI Creative Lab by DOI Collective, Fameus & the City of Antwerp, 2016-2017
Selected Clients
- CIRECA - Domaine de Boisbuchet
- Romanian Cultural Institute, Berlin
- FOMU, Antwerp
- DOCVILLE - International Documentary Film Festival
- EuroPython Society