A native of the Republic of Georgia, Giorgi Shanidze was born a true artist. He started to paint at age 3. Along with regular school he attended art schools in his home town, Tbilisi. He also expressed his passion for art through dance. Performing on stage from a very young age, he was surrounded by the history embodied in the dance of one of the oldest ethnicities in the world. At the age of 16, being a principal dancer in the company, Giorgi also joined Tbilisi Iakob Nikoladze Art School. It is a leading Arts College where students are selected through a tough entrance exam. Upon admission he started studying painting and drawing in the Faculty of Painting.
Today Giorgi Shanidze is accomplished artist living and creating in Brookline, Massachusetts. His unique taste and strong professional training allow him success in many mediums from oil painting and drawing to doll making and sculpting. In 2012 Giorgi successfully participated in a group exhibition in Boston MA. In 2016 he was featured in “Design of New England” magazine for one of the murals, he created for local restaurant.
Excerpt from: https://www.saatchiart.com/
Lizi Budagashvili (b. 2000) is an artist born and raised in Tbilisi, Georgia. She earned her BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida in 2023, and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2025. Having left home at the age of 17, she spent seven years in the United States before recently relocating from New York back to Tbilisi.
Her paintings explore childhood, nostalgia, and the longing for simpler times, delving into ephemeral, mirage-like childhood recollections. She draws dreamscapes from memory gaps and creates ethereal atmospheres through transparent veils that reflect memories after multiple layers of removal and interpretation. Stained surfaces, magical folk creatures, and dreamlike realms blur the line between distant memories and reality.
She is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2019, 2020) and has held solo exhibitions internationally, including Kaleidoscope at Wohlleb Gallery in Vienna and Fireflies at Vernissage Gallery in Tbilisi. Her work invites viewers to reflect on a comforting yet haunting nostalgia rooted not in a tangible place, but in imagined homelands built of memory stains and glimpses.
Originally from Georgia, Ana Tkabladze came to the United States 11. Growing up in a family of artists, she was immersed in a rich blend of artistic, linguistic, and cultural influences. Her passion for exquisitely crafted artifacts led her first to study art history and archaeology, participating in archaeological excavations and earning an MA in Mediterranean Archaeology from University College London.
After settling in the Washington, DC area, Ana dedicated herself to metalsmithing and cloisonné enameling, drawn to the limitless possibilities of working with metal and glass. In 2016 she launched her enamel jewelry line, GalleriaGeorgiAna, a brand that incorporates her name and pays tribute to Georgia’s rich enameling tradition. Her collections are deeply narrative, drawing on archaeology, mythology, symbology, and personal reflection, with each piece named and designed to embody a story of resilience, heritage, or emotion.
Her work has received 1st place in enameling at the Creative Craft Council’s Annual Exhibition at Strathmore Mansion, and has been showcased at the Georgian and French Embassies and The World Bank. In July 2024, Ana was selected to join the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Old Town Alexandria, where Studio #3 is now her creative home.
Salome Rigvava was born in 1988 in Gagra, Abkhazia. She often focuses on a single cultural symbol and explores her subject in terms that are deeply personal. The figures are often females in different degrees of awareness. The tones are often soft but can take on a hyper-saturated and dark quality that lends to the psychology.
Salome graduated with a MFA at the New York Academy of Art, and continued her studies on a full scholarship at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design with Professor Holger Bunk in 2014. Previously, she studied painting at the Tbilisi State Academy of Art. She has participated in many personal and group exhibitions all around the world and was an Artist in Residence at Art Mora Studio Program in Ridgefield, New Jersey during the summer of 2016.
Her works are currently in private collections in Germany, Japan, the USA, Sweden, the UK, Russia and her homeland of Georgia.
Kako Dzneladze, born in 1958, despite being a representative
of a generation of artists active in post-Soviet Georgia, began his artistic education at the I. Repin Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. Following the training of this elite university, he has remained under the strong influence of figurative painting with conventional techniques. The themes closest to Kako are
classical – portrait, self-portrait, nudes, still life and landscapes. He is deeply influenced by the impressionist, Art Nouveau or Art Deco styles.
Undoubtedly, Kako’s style reflects his life experiences born
into a country with a complicated history, often encouraging him to display fairy-tale and poetic themes in his works, and “escaping” towards symbolism.