Alina Tenser is a Ukrainian-born artist and educator. Working across sculpture, video, and performance, her practice explores the dialogue between play, constraint, and language, often through forms that invite tactile or imagined interaction. Tenser is especially interested in affordances—features like handles, zippers, or wheels that suggest use and shape behavior—as a way of thinking about how we navigate the limitations and openings in our lives. Born in Ukraine and raised in the U.S. from the age of nine, she mines the entanglements of her experience as an immigrant and parent to inform her attention to resourcefulness, transformation, displacement, and the embodied experience.
Tenser’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at KinoSaito Art Center (Verplanck, NY), HESSE FLATOW (New York, NY), SE Cooper Contemporary (Portland, OR), 17Essex Gallery (New York, NY), Konstepidemin (Gothenburg, SE), Soloway Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), and AIR (New York, NY). Her work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, BOMB Magazine, Cultured, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Third Rail.
In 2022, she completed In Parentheses, a public installation at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Chemo Infusion Center in Brooklyn. In 2024, her work was included in Great Women Sculptors, a Phaidon Press survey honoring 300 women sculptors from the Renaissance to today. She has participated in residencies at Triangle Arts (Brooklyn, NY), Lighthouse Works (Fishers Island, NY), the Queens Museum Studio Program (Queens, NY), and Recess (Brooklyn, NY). Tenser is an Assistant Professor of Art at Lehigh University, where she teaches sculpture.Email
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