Polina Angelova is a London-based curator, concept designer, and producer. Born in Bulgaria, Polina Angelova holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Design in collaboration with the Design Museum in London, BA (Hons) in Fashion and Textile, and Professional Qualification Artist-Designer from the Accademia D’Arte in Florence.
Polina Angelova is the founder and creative director of Hidden Identity Projects, a project with a mission of raising awareness of an extraordinary fact kept secret until 1989 – the Saving of almost 48,000 Bulgarian Jews during the Holocaust. Founded in 2017, Hidden Identity Projects, formerly known as IDentity Projects, focuses on a series of creative interventions addressing themes of time, remembrance, loss, and trauma-centered identity. In support of the project’s mission, Angelova has developed the concept of a unique museum performance to share the Bulgarian involvement in the Jewish Holocaust and honor the memory in all the different countries around the world through means of curation, cultural diplomacy, and international relations.
Polina Angelova has collaborated with museums, embassies, contemporary galleries, designers, artists, and institutions including the Design Museum in London, the Bulgarian Embassy in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Bulgaria, the London Design Festival, Clerkenwell Design Week, Collect Design Fair, Hull Studio, Gallery FUMI, LAPADA, and Pret A Porter in Paris.
As a curator, Polina Angelova focuses on innovation at the intersection of the Arts, Science, and Technology. Angelova has more than 20 years of experience in the field of culture. She is a global ambassador of Bulgaria through her work as a curator supporting the cultural exchange between Bulgaria, Israel, and the United Kingdom.
Polina Angelova invented innovative ways of visual curating by producing new conceptual messages for the world. She is the author of the ‘Maps to Heaven’ Highly Conceptual Fine Art Photography series with Holocaust Survivor Lady Zahava Kohn MBE and her daughter Hephzibah Rudofsky. The series explores destiny as a correspondence between the position of the heavenly constellations and the individual path of the human being. Combining the pursuit of beauty with the scientific observations of the Universe, the series shows the most intimate relationship between Man, Time, and the Cosmos. MAPS TO HEAVEN is a journey both on a physical and divinely scientific level through life’s most significant moments of a Holocaust Survivor.
Polina Angelova is the author of the 12 STARS Visual History Series. She is currently writing a book and creating a historical recording for posterity, documenting short films with testimonies of Holocaust Survivors, Witnesses of the Holocaust, and Second-generation Holocaust Survivors.
As a designer, Angelova’s contemporary fashion designs were curated at multiple fashion shows and exhibited at the Pret A Porter and Zip Zone Montaigne in Paris, France. The French Vogue described Angelova’s designs as an aesthetic experience of luxury.
As an artist, Polina Angelova created ‘Alabaste’ – the first in the world and a one-of-a-kind painting for concentration, and received a letter of approval to appear in the ‘International Contemporary Masters’, ‘Current Masters’, and ‘Important World Artists’. She was invited to exhibit her first collection of gold leaf paintings at Chelsea Town Hall in London. Lisa le Feuvre, former Head of the Henry Moore Institute and executive director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, compared Angelova’s gold leaf artworks to the artistic works of the Swedish mystic artist Hilma af Klint. Her very close encounters with Lisa Le Feuvre played a major role in Angelova’s life. After completing the information book for ‘Temperature of Sculpture’ – the first institutional exhibition of the Japanese artist Jiro Takamatsu, Polina decided to enroll in a Master’s in Curation and undertake a diverse range of curatorial projects.
Polina Angelova is a co-founder of the Bulgarian-Jewish Research Institute.