Rossitza Todorova
Rossitza Todorova, featured in the “Time Capsule” exhibition, is a professional visual artist and Professor of Art at Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, Nevada. She earned her Master of Fine Arts from the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Nevada, Reno.
Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, Todorova immigrated to the western United States as a child, where she developed a deep connection to the desert landscape that continues to shape her artistic vision. Her multidisciplinary practice spans painting, drawing, printmaking, book forms, video, and installation. Influenced by the stark beauty of the Great Basin and the region's cyclical boom-and-bust architecture, Todorova often blends landscape and geometry, creating work that exists between representation and abstraction, with a focus on visual movement.
Todorova's work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and is included in numerous permanent collections, such as the Nevada Museum of Art, the John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art, Renown Health, the Tucson Museum of Art, the University of Arizona Museum of Art, the Arizona State University Art Museum, and the Museum of Painting and Sculpture in Istanbul, Turkey.
In 2022–23, she served as the Reno City Artist, a role dedicated to engaging the community through the visual arts. She is also the recipient of the 2015 Phoenix Art Museum Contemporary Forum Artist Grant and the 2013 Squire Sanders Art Fellowship. Her work has been featured in publications including Create! Magazine, Superstition Review, Studio Visit, and Southwest Contemporary. Todorova currently creates her work at the Lakeside Court Art Studios in Reno, Nevada.
Artist Statement
The desert is a place of both clarity and illusion. Its vast openness reveals everything, yet shifting light and atmosphere transform what is seen into something fleeting and elusive. I am drawn to these ephemeral moments: a rainbow appearing after a storm, clouds dissolving into an endless sky, light bending across the horizon. They feel almost like a memory or mirage, real and present yet impossible to hold.
My work is an attempt to slow down and linger with fleeting moments, embracing both their beauty and their transience. Images of balloons drifting like constellations and fleeting rainbows make me pause and question what I am seeing. These experiences take me outside of the everyday, reminding me that there is so much more to this life and this place than the hustle of my own experience.
Each painting becomes both a record and an echo, not a direct representation of the landscape but a reflection of its temporality and mystery. I seek to honor the desert as a space of wonder, where time stretches, boundaries blur, and the natural world reminds us of our own impermanence.
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