Polina Kalashnikova

Born in 1995 in Tarusa, a small Russian town home to many artists and poets, Polina Kalashnikova started making art at a very young age and has never stopped.

Her fresh, colorful, and inventive illustrations are the result of a creative process made up of countless sketches, random imperfections, and intuitions which often take her work to new and unexpected places. She loves drawing with markers, a simple yet instinctive technique that allows her to connect to the little girl inside, Polya, who used to draw all the time, even while eating soup—spoon in one hand, marker in the other.

Polina has illustrated Why Noah Chose the Dove, by Isaac B. Singer (Knizhniki, 2021), Encyclopedia of Desires: If You Want to Be Good-Looking by Eugen Kluev (Samokat, 2022), Hard to Be Kind: Stories of Things, People and Animals, by Lyudmila Ulitskaya (Individual, 2022), and English for parrots by Eugen Kluev, Samokat). Her illustration for a catalog cover was a finalist of the 2023 Golden Pinwheel Young Illustrators Competition and her unpublished project 1000 and One Dinosaurs was selected in the 2020 AOI World Illustration Award.

Click here to read Polina's Mini Proust Q&I (Question and Illustration) inspired by the Proust Questionnaire.

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