Milena joined King’s College London as an academic researcher in 2007. While working on the AHRC Beyond Text project ‘Pictures of Peace and Justice: Documentation, Evidence and Impact of Visual Material in International War Crimes Prosecution’ in 2011-12, she created a visual arts output — a series of silkscreen prints exhibited at King’s Place, London — to complement the academic publications. Milena has continued to interweave art and academia in subsequent projects.

Her arts practice engages particularly with place and perception, sight and site, using a range of media, including print-making, photography, analogue film, digital video and site-specific installation. A key ongoing project is ‘In/Visible War Crimes Sites’. Milena has worked on academic, arts and often conflict-related projects with the British Film Institute, the National Film Theatre and LUX.

She has held seminars and given presentations at Tate Britain, Tate Modern and participated in many other national and international academic conferences. As an artist, Milena has won national and international juried competitions, and been awarded residencies and bursaries, including the 2020 Analogue Photography Grant (Richard and Siobhán Coward Foundation) and 2021 Arts Council England funding.

Website: www.milenamichalski.com

Research interests

• Visual arts and peace and security
• Still and moving images and war crimes
• Construction and propaganda in film and photography
• Experimental film and photography
• Russian and Soviet cinema
• László Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus

Artist in Residence Project 

Milena was AHRC Artist in Residence from 2016-2021, on three AHRC-GCRF funded 'Art & Reconciliation' projects. She is currently Artist Researcher on the project 'Art and Reconciliation: the History and Practice of Foto Depo - the Photographic Archive of the History Museum of Bosnia and Hercegovina'.

https://artreconciliation.org/arts-and-reconciliation/artist-in-residence-milena-michalski/

Qualifications

• PhD School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London 2000
• MA Fine Art Chelsea College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London 2012-2014
• MA Russian Language and Literature 1989
• BA Russian Language and Literature 1987

Publications

Book

• War, Image and Legitimacy: Viewing Contemporary Conflict, Routledge, London and New York, 2007 (with James Gow)

Selected Articles

• ‘Enmeshed’, in Less a Building: Interactions with the London Zoo Aviary, Michaela Nettell, ed., Passengers, London, 2021, pp. 102-112
• ‘Künstlerische Spurensuche im Westbalkan’ (‘Artistic Traces in the Westen Balkans’ text in English), Swiss Helsinki Committee for Democracy, Rule of Law and Human Rights newsletter June 2020
• ‘Pictures of Peace and Justice from Nuremberg to the Holocaust: Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, Memory of the Camps, and Majdanek: Cemetery of Europe — Missing Films, Memory Gaps and the Impact Beyond the Courtroom of Visual Material in War Crimes Prosecutions’, History, October 2013, vol. 98, issue 332, pp. 548-66 (with James Gow and Rachel Kerr)
• ‘Space capsule justice: the ICTY and Bosnia – image, distance and disconnection’, Slavonic and East European Review, October 2013, issue 91, vol. 4, pp. 818-846 (with James Gow and Rachel Kerr)
• ‘Prosecuting with pictures: Two decades of experience and Evolution’, Prosectuting War Crimes. Lessons and legacies of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ed. James Gow, Rachel Kerr, Zoran Pajic, Routledge, 2013, (with James Gow)
• ‘Construction and reconstruction: Komsomol and The Giant and the Builder’, The Ivens Magazine, July 2010
• ‘Cultural Representation of Atrocity and Repentance’ Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, Vol.7 No.3 September 2007
• ‘The Impact of War: Spoiled Appetites and Progressive Decay’ in Sabrina P. Ramet and Vjeran Pavlakovic, eds., The Dysfunctional State: Serbian Politics and Society Since 1989, University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 2005