Studio 88 Artist Residency is pleased to welcome filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Borjana Ventzislavova, whose work moves between cultures, histories, and forms. Joining our residency in November–December 2025, she plans to explore connections between indigeneity, meditation, and everyday practices of awareness in Northern Thailand. During her residency, she will visit local communities, document lived experiences, and gather material for her new project The Ghost is Present. Borjana Ventzislavova’s residency is funded by Austrian Federal Ministry of Arts and Culture.
Borjana Ventzislavova is an artist and filmmaker whose multidisciplinary practice spans photography, film and video, installation, performance, new media, and interventions in public space. Her works, held in both private and public collections, explore contemporary social realities through a sharp, critical, and often participatory lens. A graduate of the University of Applied Arts Vienna with an MA in Visual Media Art/Digital Art, she has also pursued documentary filmmaking through the Ex Oriente workshop. In recognition of her significant contributions to the visual arts, she has been awarded honorary Austrian citizenship.
Born in Sofia and based in Vienna, Borjana Ventzislavova moves “in-between cultures, languages and contexts,” exploring the shifting relationships between past and present, individual and society. Working across film and video, installation, photography, performative and new media art, she examines “stereotypical roles and models of representation” and the influence of political and social power structures on everyday existence. Her practice focuses on mobility and the crossing of socio-geographical, cultural, and psychological borders, engaging with the “complexity of communication and translation.” Often blurring the line between documentary and fiction, she tests the boundaries between the personal and the collective, the social, political and artistic, weaving together narrative structures in which identities, situations, styles, texts and sounds are mixed, exchanged, and reframed.
Her work has been widely exhibited in major museums, art institutions, and international media-art and film festivals worldwide. She has received numerous awards, grants, and scholarships—including the City of Vienna’s Promotion Award (2017), the Austrian State Scholarship for Fine Art (2013), and several film and media recognitions. Ventzislavova has participated in residencies across Europe, the US, and Canada, and her works are held in both private and public collections.
In The Ghost is Present, Borjana Ventzislavova proposes a new research-based project rooted in her long-standing fascination with Thailand’s “natural and human habitats and ecosystems.” After revisiting the country in 2022 and encountering northern indigenous communities—including Lisu and Karen groups—she was struck by traditions that echoed those of her native Bulgaria and by the presence of over seventy minority groups in Thailand. Building on previous works focused on Indigenous knowledge (We the Nature, Wahkohtowin, Water Walk With Us), she intends to explore connections between “the physical body, mind, and brain” and the relationships people maintain with living and non-living nature.
Her research centers on Indigeneity, Meditation, and the “extraordinary” culture of handcraft in the North, seeking a shared denominator between embodied practices, breathing techniques, and everyday forms of awareness. Inspired by a nun’s words—“One can meditate anywhere and at any time”—she positions this insight as the conceptual point of departure.
Ventzislavova aims to visit multiple communities, document experiences through sound, photography, video, and text, study local plants and healing practices, and engage with temples, forests, and local artists. The broader Chiang Mai region offers the ideal environment to gather knowledge relevant to climate-conscious ways of living and being.
Borjana Ventzislavova’s residency is funded by Austrian Federal Ministry of Arts and Culture.
More about Borjana Ventzislavova
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