Zhenya Gershman is an internationally renowned artist. She was born in Moscow, Russia and held her 1st solo exhibition in St. Petersburg at age 14. She was selected as a subject of the TV documentary film Our Generation, a project dedicated to searching for the five most talented teenagers in Russia, showing hope for the cultural future of the country. The youngest student to be admitted to Otis Art Institute, Zhenya graduated with Honors and later received her Masters of Fine Arts degree from Art Center College of Design. Today, Gershman’s portraits are featured in public and private collections including Douglas Simon and Richard Weisman (she is included in the book Picasso to Pop: The Richard Weisman Collection). Gershman’s portrait of Sting was acquired for the permanent collection of the Arte Al Limite Museum in Santiago, Chile. Zhenya participates in important international exhibitions including Art Aspen, Art Miami, and Art Chicago. The GRAMMY MusiCares Foundation selected Gershman to create portraits of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. Her exhibition "Larger Than Life" was broadcast by Entertainment Tonight, Extra, and featured in The New York Post. A documentary film, The Model’s Artist, highlights Gershman’s innovative approach to working with artists’ models. In 2000, Gershman was a recipient of ALEX Award in Visual Arts from The National Alliance for Excellence, Honored Scholars and Artists Program, presented by Peter Frank, who is quoted as saying that Gershman’s effort evokes not only Whistler’s and Sargent’s, but that from which they took inspiration, Manet’s and Velazquez’s⏤masters of the figure who in their own ways avoided the banal literalities of their contemporaries for a rendition truer to the vagaries of vision, and (thereby) to the dynamics of human presence.
In addition to her artistic career, Gershman is an independent scholar and a museum educator. She has worked for over a decade at the J. Paul Getty Museum and has contributed to such exhibitions as Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits and Rembrandt: Telling the Difference. As a coFounder and President of Project AWE, a nonprofit foundation for the arts and education, Gershman has dedicated her scholarly and charitable work to provide new dimensions in understanding and experiencing the cultural icons of Western European heritage. Gershman’s groundbreaking discovery regarding the presence of a hidden Rembrandt selfportrait was published by Arion, Boston University and was brought to European audiences by Le Monde. She continues to work in her studio and is currently working on a book Dürer’s Labyrinth: Melencolia in the Context of Early Modern Knowledge following her article Dürer’s Enigma: A Kabbalistic Revelation in Melencolia §I published by Brill’s Aries Journal.