Nikita Shokhov is a New York-based visual artist and creative technologist with over 60 shows, performances, and screenings internationally. He has been exploring various aspects of the human condition in his visual art practice; some of them are the self and inner world, humanism and new technologies, the human unconscious, the carnivalesque, black studies, and queer phenomenology. His works discourse critical thinking, philosophy, documentary approach, social-political agendas, and existential matters. Nikita has always worked with humans and lens-based media, from traditional photography to volumetric cinematic forms. In his current practice, he uses live performance, real-time graphics, game engines, spatial cinematics, creative coding, and human-computer interaction, merging physical performance with magical digital worlds to create profoundly transformative experiences.

His collaborative drag augmented reality performance “Dragzina” was officially selected at DOK Leipzig (Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig) and Athens Digital Arts Festival (Greece). His collaborative virtual reality film, a laboratory of understanding whiteness and blackness, “Klaxon. My Dear Sweet Friend,” was shown at Loop Barcelona and awarded at FIVARS (Canada). World Press Photo (Netherlands) awarded his art project “Utrish,” a politically driven photography series of picturesque documentary portraits of nudists on a seashore.

In New York, Nikita participated in three artist/theater residencies: the International Studio and Curatorial Program, the Curatorial Program for Research: Hello New York!, and the Watermill Center International Summer Program. Nikita had extensive academic practice in spatial interactive storytelling at Virginia Tech (School of Visual Arts), immersive filmmaking and hybrid Virtual Reality theater at California Institute of the Arts (School of Film/Video and School of Theater), and documentary photography at the Rodchenko Art School Moscow.

His photography and time-based media artworks have been featured in over 30 publications in magazines and newspapers worldwide. As a creative technologist, Nikita has recently produced several commissioned mixed-reality projects in visual art, performance, music, academia, film, and audiovisual installation industry.