Jana Astanov
Jana Astanov is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and independent curator originally from the Mazuria (Mazury) Lake District in Poland, now based in the Shawangunk Mountains in the United States. She is the founder of CREATRIX Magazine (www.creatrixmag.com), a platform that merges art, activism, and spirituality. Her body of work spans performance art, writing, photography, sound art, and installation. Astanov draws upon spiritual traditions, ritual theater, hypnotic trance, sound art, and astrofeminism, a concept she developed through her ongoing durational performance persona, Agni Jnana Yannanda: The One Who Speaks With The Stars. This performance embodies the essence of the Artist as Medium, through which she channels energies, memories, and ideas into artistic expression.
She is the author of six poetry collections: Antidivine, Northern Grimoire, Sublunar, The Pillow Book of Burg, and Birds of Equinox. In 2017, she founded Red Temple Press, an imprint of CREATRIX Magazine. Astanov has presented her work internationally, performing at Tate Modern, Smack Mellon Gallery, Grace Exhibition Space, the Venice Biennale, Documenta 2017, and numerous galleries, festivals, and independent venues worldwide.
Artist Statement
Jana Astanov is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans performance, installation, photography, sound, and writing. Her practice draws on trance, movement, and site-specific ceremony to create immersive environments in which the audience becomes part of a living cosmological field. She approaches the body as a ritual instrument, linking land, stars, and collective presence through participatory actions that open spaces of heightened perception and shared experience.
Astanov’s work integrates mythic knowledge with contemporary technology, shaping a form of ritual futurism that sees human, earthly, and cosmic intelligence as deeply intertwined. Drawing from her upbringing in the Masuria Lake District of Poland and her engagement with Slavic and Baltic folk traditions, she merges ancestral memory with experimental media and intuitive practices. Astrology, sound, divination, and altered states of awareness often serve as guiding structures, allowing her performances to function as sites of transformation, spiritual inquiry, and relational healing.
Her installations and live works invite audiences into ceremonial space, where movement, breath, and symbolic gesture become methods of attunement. The work reflects on embodiment, sovereignty, and collective becoming, offering an expanded understanding of performance as both artistic and cosmological practice.
Across all media, Astanov explores art as a conduit between visible and invisible worlds and as a practice capable of reshaping our relationship to the cosmos, to each other, and to the living Earth.
www.janaastanov.com
