Olya Avstreyh (b. 1988, Moscow) is a visual artist based in Margate, UK, selected for 2025–26 Tracey Emin Artist Residency T.E.A.R. art school programme. Olya’s dramatic expressionist works convey a sense of confusion and tension about herself and modern life. Driven by this frustration, she explores the fractured human condition through somewhat grotesque images of people caught off guard, out of sync with their surroundings.

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Avstreyh draws from the creative and manic spark of her early girlhood days, as a tool to dig the subconscious, blending it with her current experiences of womanhood and immigration, both traumatic and otherwise. Layering and documenting these shifting selves, she weaves a stream-of-consciousness world, a portal into a collective psyche coded with hidden literary and cinematic references, fragmented memories, and personal mythology.