Jana Shostak

Jana Shostak was born in 1993 in Grodno, Belarus. She is a Polish-Belarusian conceptual artist, humanist and help activist with a PhD, teaching in the Performance Art Studio in Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.

In her artistic practice, she consciously uses mass media, treating them as a form of artistic expression. She wants to stimulate a discussion and confrontation between different worlds. An example of this is her 1 minute of scream for Belarus, protesting against the systematic repression of critics. In 2021 she was awarded the “Gazeta Wyborcza” Giant of 2021 and Paszporty Polityki in polish visual culture for combining art & activism.

As a woman from Belarus, she has experienced hostility and systemic violence. She is the cofounder of the help movement Partyzanka Partisans, which according to the Belarusian authorities is an extremist organisation,  meaning you can be charged and potentially face a prison sentence ranging from 8 to 12 years.

From the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Jana organized aid at border crossings. Alongside her friends, she founded the Stewardesses of Peace, a first-contact group for refugees fleeing the war. Over seven months, they informed and assisted around 120,000 confused and exhausted individuals at the border, providing aid within their available resources.

Jana Shostak shows her works in art galleries in Poland and abroad, and has won numerous prizes among them: Spojrzenia (Zachęta National Gallery), the Critics’ Award at the Best Diplomas at the Academy of Fine Arts exhibition, the Start Point Prize 2017 and the Grand Prix of the Young Wolves ’16 festival. As part of her artistic work, she set the Polish Guinness Record.

In 2023 she tried to run for Polish Parliament. Currently she is working on a comedy about patriarchy Miss of the East.