Olya Avstreyh (b. 1988, Moscow) is a visual artist currently based in Margate, UK. She has been selected for the 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.

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. 

Having made international headlines with a pandemic-era series of contemporary female nudes, the focus of her gaze shifted to a spectrum of ‘situations’ — a messy mix of loneliness, isolation, and romance. Through recurring images of ferocious female or genderless figures, often bent, collapsed or turned away from the viewer, she examines the complexity and awkwardness of human behaviour and the sense of alienation that she believes defines her generation. 

Her key inspirations include folk horror, female madness narratives, and the imprint of growing up in a household of doctors and surgeons. The aesthetics of 2010s Tumblr blogging merge with formative literary influences of her teenage years. These include feminist pioneers such as Brontë, Austen, Eliot, and Woolf, as well as accounts of Russian Gulag survivors like Eugenia Ginzburg and Ariadna Efron.