I’m Margarita Kuleva, a sociologist of culture, artist, and curator. I'm based in New York and work as a visiting professor at Tufts University. In 2022-2023, I was a postdoc at New York University Jordan Center. I collaborate with TAEX, a London based platform for digital art as a senior curator. I’m interested in exploring social inequalities in the art world and creative industries in order to develop fairer working conditions in the sector. Primarily, I work as an ethnographer to discover the ‘behind the scenes’ of cultural institutions to give greater visibility for the invisible workers of culture.

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I received my PhD in sociology from the National Research University Higher School of Economics in collaboration with Bielefeld University in 2019. My dissertation entailed a comparative study of the careers and professional identities of young cultural workers in visual art sectors in Moscow, St Petersburg and London. Based on more than 70 in-depth interviews, it was one of the first systematic studies on post-Soviet creative labour. Some findings from these studies are presented in recent journal publications, including Cultural Studies (2018) and European Journal of Cultural Studies (2022).

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In 2020-2022, with Maria Safonova, I co-led a research group ‘Digital Art History’. The project brought together sociologists, art historians and designers to contribute to the social history of recent Russian art. The study aspired to give greater voice to less represented groups such as female artists and create new visual methodologies for the dissemination of the results (or, what we call ‘turning the digital turn’).

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As a researcher, artist, and curator, I have worked with a number of international cultural institutions, including Manifesta Biennale, Pushkin House in London, Boston Center for the Arts, Garage MoCA, Goethe Institute, Helsinki Art Museum, Street Art Museum, Ural Industrial Biennale and New Holland St. Petersburg.