Nadezhda Gribkova is an art historian based in Chicago.

Her research and publications span topics including mass spectacles commemorating the Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet Jewish modernism, late Soviet performance, conceptual art in Eastern Europe, and NFT art.

Her broader interests lie at the intersection of Russian modernism and the European avant-garde, 20th-century religious thought in Eastern Europe, Cold War–era artistic and literary practices, and contemporary blockchain art.

Gribkova is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she completed a thesis on the early works of the Soviet conceptual performance group Collective Actions (founded in 1976). Her research examined the group’s distinctive aesthetic and social engagement with the motif of emptiness, a concept central to conceptual art in both the Soviet Union and the West. She has also designed and taught undergraduate courses in Art History.

She is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Her current research focuses on the reemergence of spiritual and transcendental concerns in late Soviet unofficial culture, with particular attention to how artists and writers reengaged Christian traditions under ideological constraint. She is especially interested in the persistence of Orthodox aesthetic and theological frameworks in postwar Soviet thought and their intersections with postmodernism in Russian art and literature.