Eastern Europe is a subregion of the European continent. As a largely ambiguous term, it has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic connotations. Its eastern boundary is marked by the Ural Mountains, whilst its western boundary is defined in various ways. Most definitions include the countries of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania while less restrictive definitions may also include some or all of the Balkans, the Baltic states, the Caucasus, and the Visegrád group.
In art history, literature and cultural studies, Orientalism is the imitation or depiction of aspects of the Eastern world by writers, designers, and artists from the Western world. Orientalist painting, particularly of the Middle East, was one of the many specialties of 19th-century academic art, and Western literature was influenced by a similar interest in Oriental themes.
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum is an American journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. Applebaum also holds Polish citizenship.
Magdalena Abakanowicz was a Polish sculptor and fiber artist. Known for her use of textiles as a sculptural medium and for outdoor installations, Abakanowicz has been considered among the most influential Polish artists of the postwar era. She worked as a professor of studio art at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland, from 1965 to 1990, and as a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles in 1984.
Hanna Krall is a Polish writer with a degree in journalism from the University of Warsaw, specializing among other subjects in the history of the Holocaust in occupied Poland.
Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland. In 2019, she was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Polish female prose writer for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life". For her novel Flights, Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Her works include Primeval and Other Times, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and The Books of Jacob.
Henryk Stażewski was a Polish painter, visual artist and writer. Stażewski has been described as the "father of the Polish avant-garde" and is considered a pivotal figure in the history of constructivism and geometric abstraction in Central and Eastern Europe. His career spanned seven decades and he was one of the few prominent Polish artists of the interwar period who remained active and gained further international recognition in the second half of the 20th century.
Zofia Kulik is a Polish artist living and working in Łomianki (Warsaw), whose art combines political criticism with a feminist perspective.
Teresa Żarnowerówna was a Polish avant-garde artist, painter, sculptor, scenographer, and architect.
Sławomir Witold Sierakowski is a Polish journalist, literary critic and sociologist as well as head of Krytyka Polityczna, a movement of left-wing intellectuals, artists and activists based in Poland and director of Institute for Advanced Study in Warsaw.
The Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen was founded in 1982. Under the directorship of Professor Wolfgang Eichwede, it has since then carved its own distinctive niche within the German academic community through an intensive study of recent developments in the culture and society of Central and East European countries.
Marci Shore is an American associate professor of intellectual history at Yale University, where she specializes in the history of literary and political engagement with Marxism and phenomenology.
Paulina Olowska is a Polish painter and photographer, who also works in the field of performance and video-art, social action and applied art. The areas of her artistic explorations are modernist utopias and research on the work of 20th century artists, which she combines with her own creative practice to bring unjustly forgotten ideas back to life. A characteristic thread in Olowska's work is her interest in female attitudes in art and her search for "protoplasts"; such as Alina Szapocznikow and Zofia Stryjeńska. The artist lives and works in Rabka-Zdrój.
Ewa Partum is a poetry artist, performance artist, filmmaker, mail artist, and conceptual artist.
Krzysztof Czyżewski is a Polish author, one of the initiators of the Borderland Foundation in Sejny, Poland.
Culture.pl is a large Polish multilingual project and web portal devoted to Polish culture. It was founded by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in March 2001. The project promotes the work of Polish artists around the world and is a popular information database on all artistic aspects of Polish culture. Originally available in Polish, English and Russian, it is now also available in Ukrainian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese. Its ISSN number is 1734-0624.
Darra Goldstein is an American author and food scholar who is the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, emerita at Williams College.
Karolina Wigura is a sociologist, historian of ideas and journalist. She is Member of the Board of Kultura Liberalna Foundation, which publishes Kultura Liberalna, one of Poland's leading weekly magazines. She is also a Senior Fellow of the German liberal-conservative thinktank Zentrum Liberale Moderne (LibMod), an assistant professor at Warsaw University's Institute of Sociology and a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Maria Dulębianka was a Polish artist and activist, notable for promoting women’s suffrage and higher education.
Ewa Alicja Majewska is a Polish philosopher, political activist and an author. In the 1990s and early 2000s, she was involved in anarchist, anti-border, ecological and women's movements.
