Asya Reznikov was born in Russia in 1973, and came to the United States to live in a small apartment in Boston with her parents and grandparents when she was five years old. No one in the family spoke English at that time, and the artist sponging up the language of her newfound home and country, became the first to learn English. Not only was she the first to learn English, she also became the translator for the family and the link to her new culture, a heavy load to bear for a young child.

She was drawing, painting and cutting things out for as long as she can remember. Even before the journey to her new country, she took a drawing class in Italy while the family waited for their papers to be processed to come to the U.S.

Her interest in travel began early, as an adult Reznikov has become an inveterate traveler—moving from and through different cultures by choice in contrast to her move at age five—an insatiable recorder of what she sees, hears and experiences.

In 1993 she commenced her first venture into “serious” art making, when she discovered glass as a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology—a compromise that satisfied her parents in that she went there to study industrial design. In 1994 she studied glass with Keith Cunningham at the University of Wolverhampton, England, and then traveled through Europe for six months on a mission to visit as many museums and studios as possible, and to soak up the art in European museums.

When she returned to the U.S. she studied at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, and received her BFA with a concentration in glass in 1997. Ever the traveler, she went to Murano, Italy for a year, and worked in the Fratelli Zanetti factory blowing glass. She was the second American woman to work in a Murano glass factory, memorable to the Italians for her persistence and dedication to the work at hand, and her chosen perfume, a scent of crushed rose petals. The glass workers always knew when Asya had arrived when the perfume of roses filled the air.

Reznikov proceeded to have a distinguished career in glass; she was awarded a month-long residency at the Studio of the Corning Museum of Glass, New York, and received the Jutta-Cuny Franz Foundation award in 2002 for her glass sculptures. She taught glass-casting workshops at Corning and was a teaching assistant at Pilchuck Glass School, Seattle, interspersing her teaching with more travel adventures. This time her spirit took her to India for four months where she traveled throughout the country alone in 1999. In 2000 she moved to New York where she continued to work on her glass sculpture independently for a few years. She received her MFA from Hunter College, New York, in 2006 with a concentration in combined media. It was during her time at Hunter that the artist moved away from the medium of glass to photography, video and installation pieces.

Since the inception of her photographic and video art making, the themes of travel, language, immigration, emigration, otherness, identity in different cultures as foreigner and traveler, have been her focus. She says:

”Much of my interest in languages and cultures has to do with my personal cultural upbringing. Coming to the United States as a political refugee when I was a child has made me particularly aware of my cultural identity. Being raised in one culture at home, but surrounded by another culture outside created a sensitivity to languages, culture and identity.”

In her book On Photography, Susan Sontag writes: “The photographer is super tourist, an expansion of the anthropologist, visiting natives and bringing back news of their exotic doings and strange gear.” This quote applies to Reznikov’s use of her cameras—her footage the grist from which she composes her palette. Not only is Reznikov a traveler, she is also a linguist. In addition to English, she speaks Russian, French, Italian and German.

The artist is currently the recipient of a ten-month DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst) fellowship to live and work in Berlin, where she has been taking video and photo footage, drawing, and making models she uses as props in her photos.

Reznikov’s work has been included in group exhibitions in this country and abroad since 1995. She had her first solo show in Berlin in November 2006, and her first solo show in the U.S. is her “Baggage Claim” installation at NHG this month. She returns to New York to resume her life in Manhattan this summer, in August.