Eka Zharinova
Eka Zharinova is a contemporary dance performance artist and researcher. She has performed in dance productions choreographed by Tatiana Baganova, Maida Rust Withers, Alexander Pepelyaev, Anouk van Dijk, Natalia Levchenko, Evgeny Martyanov, Kota Yamazaki, Mina Nishimura, Olga Tsvetkova, Annie Pui Ling Lok, Yael Flexer, and others, appearing internationally in Belgium, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, the UK, and the USA.
From 2007 to 2017, Eka founded and produced the Small-Format Festival in Yekaterinburg and co-produced its Tyumen satellite with Elena Dann from 2016 to 2017. Between 2013 and 2018, she also produced independent performance programmes for museums, libraries, and other public spaces in Yekaterinburg. In 2026, she co-produced “DIY Night: Never Event” with other artists at Chisenhale Dance Space in London.
Since 2008, both individually and in collaboration with other artists, she has been creating experimental dance-media performances that explore the coexistence of the human body and the digital, among other themes.
Eka holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Davis. Her practice is grounded in dance performance as research. Her artistic and research interests lie at the intersections of dance and technology, dance and mathematics, and dance and society.
Eka identifies as a contemporary dance performance artist and researcher emerging from the context of Russian Contemporary Dance of the Newest Times (RCDNT). RCDNT encompasses diverse artistic forms and practices of contemporary dance that have developed in Russia since the early 1990s. From 1997 to 2018, she was part of the contemporary dance community in Yekaterinburg, the capital of the Ural region outside central Russia, where cultural nationalism is less dominant, and there is interesting potential for exploratory change.
Her work focuses on experimental artistic practices developed alongside dominant mainstream discourses. Her performance-as-research projects explore faciality in dance, the use of stochastic processes and other mathematical concepts in choreography, real-time engagement with digital technologies during performance, and the concept of “aleatory intimacy.”
Both her individual and collaborative projects investigate how different media can foster unpredictability and change within larger, less flexible but more recognised cultural and social frameworks.