Dear friends,
I'm back with a roundup of the past three months.
As always, it's been a full one: exhibitions, travels, conversations with fascinating people, new projects, and milestones reached. So ー more news than I can fit into one issue!
Having said that, here are the highlights I am most excited to share.
As always, I'd love to hear back from you. Your thoughts, reactions, and questions mean a lot to me.
So please don't hesitate to reply to this email. I'm always up for a good conversation.
P.S. I've decided that from now on, this newsletter will be in English only.
With warmth,
Dina
On 25th March, we opened our group exhibition Becoming Through Pain at Somers Gallery in London, curated by Huma Kabakcı.
The space was full all night. Artists, friends, journalists, and art lovers came together, bringing a warmth to the room that’s hard to describe.
It was one of those moments that reminded me why I do what I do.
One of the most memorable parts of the evening was Dyana Gravina’s live performance, What I Don’t Know Yet I Know. It was intimate, subtle, and deeply moving.
The exhibition featured works by Pauline Batista, Sena Başöz, Shannon Bono, Dyana Gravina, Jennifer Nieuwland, Lolita Pelegrime, Aziza Shaden, and Gülce Tulçalı — each exploring the body as a space of memory, resilience, and transformation.
A huge thank you to everyone who helped bring this to life, and to those of you who came and shared the evening with us.
We hope to see you at the next one
P.S. Some of the works featured in the exhibition are still available for purchase. If you're interested, please let me know, and I'll send you a catalog.
Last year, we launched our first open call for emerging women artists.
We've now decided to make it a yearly initiative.
Supporting and amplifying female voices remains at the center of what we do, and the open call has become an important part of that.
In September 2025, we presented the group exhibition On the Other Way in Barcelona, bringing together a powerful collective of emerging artists.
Our 2025 open call winner was Jinguyi Li, an exceptional lace artist whose work explores feminist spaces and centres on women’s stories.
As part of her award, Jinguyi received three months of PR support from our team.
She was recently featured in the Financial Times as part of their Collect 2026 at Somerset House coverage, and has also been commissioned by The New York Times for editorial illustrations.
This year's open call (27 May–17 June) brought in 128 female artist portfolios!
Now is the delightful time to process the applications… Stay tuned. We’re really excited about what’s coming next!
At the end of April, I made it to Milan Design Week. I was only there for a couple of days, but it was more than enough to fall in love with it all over again.
The energy of the art objects, installations, and people was extraordinary.
Most importantly, Auronda Scalera invited me to the opening of Sougwen Chung's first institutional exhibition in Italy.
Auronda is one of the world's leading digital art curators and a former Sensity Open Call jury member. The exhibition is held at Palazzo Citterio, the National Museum of Digital Art.
Sougwen is a Canadian-Chinese artist and currently one of the top digital artists globally, with shows at Art Basel Hong Kong and the Victoria & Albert Museum under her belt.
In early May, I headed to the Venice Biennale opening as part of a group of 16 put together by Gisela Winkelhofer, an art curator, collector, and the founder of Edition ArtCo, a strategic consultancy in the art industry.
Two highlights were particularly memorable.
First stop: Marina Abramović's exhibition "Transforming Energy," marking her 80th birthday. She's the first living woman artist to receive a solo show at the Gallerie dell'Accademia!
Second stop: Palazzo Pisani Moretta, home to the inaugural exhibition of Fondazione Dries Van Noten – "The Only True Protest Is Beauty," inspired by 1960s activist Phil Ochs.
Curated by Dries Van Noten and Gert Bruloot, it invites you to see beauty not as aesthetics but as a transformative force.
Among the national pavilions, my personal favorites were Japan, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Austria, Brazil, and Egypt. I'm definitely going back in September!
Sensity was featured in The Art Newspaper, one of the most authoritative publications covering the global art market.
Anny Shaw's piece looks at the resurgence of artist management agencies as an alternative to the traditional gallery model, framing it not as a passing trend but as a structural shift in how the art world operates.
Sensity is named alongside recognised agencies from New York, LA, and Berlin.
Among that peer set, Sensity is the only one founded by a Russian-speaking woman, built in two years with no prior art-world connections, no established name, and no investors.
Check the article here .
I was invited to join the jury of the prestigious international Globee® Awards for Achievement.
I said “yes” immediately! It's meaningful for me personally: I've won a Globee Award before both with Mindset and Sensity Studio.
The Globee Awards recognise outstanding results by individuals, teams, and companies across all industries worldwide, regardless of company size or geography.
What makes this award special is that winners are selected by independent industry experts — not by sponsors or internal committees.
Over 10 days, I reviewed 50 applications. Some of the cases were genuinely extraordinary, the kind you remember for a long time. Looking forward to the results!
We had a conversation with “Art and You” about how the international art market works, what it takes to break through faster in Europe, and how Sensity helps emerging female artists reach the global stage.
Here are the most interesting takes:
Check the full interview here .
I joined Anna Asaturova and Nastya Mishina on the podcast “Culture on the Edge” to discuss a topic the art world still struggles to address: money.
The conversation centred on female artists pricing their work openly, asserting their worth, and not undervaluing their skills.
Here are some key insights:
The episode is on YouTube .
Disclaimer: I usually keep Mindset work out of this newsletter, but we have some big news.
After six years, Mindset Consulting is becoming Mindset, and the change runs deeper than the name or the logo.
When we launched in 2020, "PR agency" described what we did. It no longer does.
Over time, our work expanded to cover positioning, brand, content, campaigns, influencer and KOL partnerships, events, and investor outreach.
So, we naturally pivoted into an integrated marketing and communications agency!
The transition comes with a parallel reorganisation. We now have a dedicated PR Lead and three new departments: Marketing, Social Media, and KOL.
We also have a new home: mindsetcomms.com .
Late May, I visited Szeged, a town of 160,000 on the Serbian–Hungarian border.
I'd been invited by MeOut Group and EU-Startups to work on what it really takes to mentor early-stage founders: navigating ethical dilemmas, validating a product or service, and further instilling an entrepreneurial mindset.
We ended up rewriting an entire accelerator program for first-time founders across five countries.
But the real value wasn't on the agenda. It was a group of strangers from Hungary, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Romania going from "who are you?" to wine festivals, late-night debates about the venture bubble, and a lot of laughing.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about women’s (and my own) worth, and how often our worth is decided by everyone except ourselves.
Whether in technology or in art, I see the same pattern: a woman’s instinct is called bias, her experience is called non-scalable, her work is at a lower price point, and her ambition is questioned the moment it stops resembling someone else’s.
Only a small fraction of the most valued artworks of the last decade were made by women. In tech, the higher you look, the fewer of us remain.
For a long time, I believed the answer was to work harder inside these systems. I’ve now come to see it differently.
The women I admire the most have stopped waiting for permission that was never going to come anyway. They are building their own structures: companies, boards, portfolio careers, and creative practices, and very importantly, defining success on their own terms.
What strikes me is that this shift begins within. Before external recognition comes an internal decision: to stop confusing exhaustion with achievement, to stop living on someone else’s timeline, and to trust that your value exists regardless of whether the room has noticed it yet.
That, to me, is the real work. Systems change slowly, but a woman who knows her own worth stops asking the system to confirm her value.
As an entrepreneur, I’ve had plenty of moments where I doubted whether I could keep going. On hard days, the right film reminds you that almost everyone who built something meaningful had to push through doubt first.
Here are five films that make you believe in yourself and go for it.
Ladies, a quick reminder that I run a non-profit initiative for women .
If you or someone you know needs support and motivation to find the courage to step forward and speak up publicly, leave a corporate job, start your own business, or make an important life decision — I would love to hear from you.
At one of our non-profit consulting sessions, a talented woman said something that stayed with me: "I've done everything right, and I still feel completely lost."
She'd outgrown her life but didn't know what came next. She was afraid that if she stopped, she'd have to admit she'd been on the wrong path for years.
We talked through it. Here's the advice I gave her, in case you need it too:
