Darja (Dasha) Filippova is scholar and an artist. Dasha’s multi-disciplinary practice is animated by the question of What is left of the Left? Her academic work is situated at the intersection of the study of global post-socialisms and performance studies. With a focus on Russia and China, her PhD dissertation, titled ‘Indigestible Bodies: Towards a Theory of Post-Socialist Performance’ (2024), examined radical embodied artistic production made during the transition from state socialism to post-Cold War neoliberal capitalism and proposed an aesthetics of ‘indigestibility’ as a mode of critique of consumer capitalism emerging from post-socialist contexts.
As a Visiting Scholar, Dasha is interested in continuing her theoretical work and research on global post-socialist performance and is embarking on a translation project of radical leftist and anarchist writings by the Moscow Actionists of the 1990s.
Dasha holds a BA from Smith College, an MA from Central European University and from The Art Institute of Chicago, and a PhD from Princeton University’s Department of Comparative Literature. Darja was a founding member of Spaika.Media, a platform dedicated to Russian performance, art and activism; she is a member of Fabrika Kukhnya, a feminist research collective. As an artist, Dasha is working under the mentorship of radical performance collective La Pocha Nostra and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. She is a two-time participant in the Ljubljana Summer School, a project founded by Zdenka Badovinac and Boris Groys dedicated to rethinking art and politics of the ‘former East.’ Darja was an editor-in-chief of Gallery Guide in Beijing, a bilingual magazine about contemporary Chinese art. Her writing has appeared in Leap, Art Margins, Randian, Utah Foreign Language Review, Poetics Today, Another New Calligraphy, The Point Journal, Performance Research and elsewhere.
Born in the USSR and raised in Estonia, she lives in NYC and goes to Earth Chxrch - an activist and performance space of worship - in the East Village. www.darjafilippova.com