Anna Novakov

Anna Novakov is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, designer, curator, and educator whose practice explores memory, migration, displacement, and utopian imaginaries through art and the senses. Born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, in 1959 and raised in Berkeley, California, Novakov was shaped by two contrasting cultural environments: the socialist utopianism of postwar Yugoslavia and the free-speech and counterculture movements of Berkeley. The daughter of environmental physicist Tihomir Novakov, she was also introduced at an early age to ideas surrounding environmentalism, technology, and the possibility of creating a more sustainable future. After earning her doctorate at New York University in 1992, she became known as an art critic and scholar writing about the intersections of contemporary art, emerging technologies, public space, and utopian thought.

Since returning to New York in 2020, Novakov has focused increasingly on her studio practice, creating olfactory installations, textiles, wall works, photography, and cross-sensory projects. As a certified perfumer, she combines conceptual art with the ephemeral qualities of scent, investigating how fragrance can evoke personal and collective memory, construct identity, and illuminate cultural histories. Her work draws on textile traditions and diasporic practices while considering scent as a medium through which migration, nostalgia, environmental change, and utopian aspirations can be experienced. By bringing together the tactile, visual, and olfactory, Novakov creates immersive works that examine seemingly ordinary materials and experiences as sites of memory, transformation, and social meaning.

She has studios in New York and the south of France.