Monika Niwelińska is a visual artist working in the media of drawing, installation, painting, printmaking and photography. Her artistic practice embraces the areas of memory and perception, especially the internal recording of place and time and its visual translation into a tangible image. She is interested in potential connections and tensions between presence and absence, appearance and disappearance – a narrative that resonates around concepts of memory and loss, traces, remains and time. In her research-based art practice she developed a concept of entropic image – a photosensitive image, subject to organically evolving processes of change and destruction, oscillating somewhere between visible and invisible.
Monika Niwelińska is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland – Faculty of Graphic Arts (Master of Fine Arts degree, diploma with honors, 2004) and the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada – Department of Art and Design (Master of Fine Arts, 2007). She also studied Philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. PhD degree in Fine Arts obtained from the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland (2013), where she holds a position of an Associate Professor in the Department of Drawing and Painting. Currently she is also teaching topic and research-based courses in the Departments of Photography as well as Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), USA.
Her education, pedagogical background and artwork are rooted in printmedia, installation, and photography, with a strong conceptual and research-oriented approach. Both of her MFA diplomas degrees (in Poland and Canada) focused on intersection between photography and printmaking, her PhD dissertation (“Latent Image”) – on relations between photosensitivity and radioactivity, as well as on ontology of the photographic image.
Major scholarships received from: the Socrates/Erasmus EU scholarship program (one-year studies at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, Austria, 2001/2002) and the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada (MFA scholarship and teaching training in the Department of Art and Design, 2005-07). Monika also received major Polish grants and awards, i.e. prestigious Young Poland Scholarship (Stypendium Młoda Polska), an Art Award of the City of Krakow, a Grant of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
Niwelińska is a Fulbright alumna. Thanks to the prestigious Fulbright scholarship (Fulbright Senior Award 2016-2017), she completed a one-year residency at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, RI, USA, working on a project "Hidden Entropy".
She has contributed to numerous individual and collective exhibitions in the US, Europe and worldwide.
Lives and works in Chicago, USA and Krakow, Poland.