Jazmina Cininas

b. 1965

Jazmina Cininas is a Melbourne/Naarm-based artist whose work has been shortlisted for over 80 art prizes and acquired by over 40 public collections in Australia, including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and Museums Victoria. International collections include the National MK Čiurlionis Art Museum, Lithuania, the Lithuanian National Art Museum, Estonian Printing & Paper Museum, MARKK Museum of Ethnology, Hamburg, and Jingdezhen University, China. Cininas recently retired from RMIT School of Art where she lectured in printmaking and artist books for close to three decades, and where she completed her PhD, The Girlie Werewolf Hall of Fame, in 2014. 

While best known for her reduction linocut portraits of female werewolves, Cininas’ practice has expanded to include intricate artist books from discarded print ephemera, percussive sculptures from used bottle caps and recycled timbers, pencil frottage from found surfaces and botanical prints utilising natural flower dyes in a conscious move towards environmentally sustainable art practices, intersecting with an auto-ethnographic exploration of her Lithuanian-Australian cultural identity. Cininas travels regularly to Lithuania and Estonia, where she has had multiple solo exhibitions and artist residencies.

Performance also forms part of Cininas’ creative repertoire, as vocalist and lyricist for the printmaking band, the Press Gang.