Elene Usdin in Conversation with Peter Rostovsky

Born in Paris, Elene Usdin is an author whose artistic practice spans drawing, painting, photography, and recently, comics. After graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs of Paris in 1998, she began her career as a scenic painter on the film Pola X by Léos Carax. Winner of the Picto Prize for Young Fashion Photographer in 2006, she published a collection of photography through Éditions Contrejour in 2013. In 2020, Wayne State University Press edited We are Woodbridge, a photographic collection of portraits of Detroit.

She has collaborated with Compagnie DCA Decouflé, l’Opéra du Rhin, the Fondation Lafayette Anticipations, and most recently with the Théatre des Celestins de Lyon. Her photography has been exhibited in Detroit at the Museum of New Art in 2014, and at the Galerie Camille in 2018.

She published her first graphic novel René.e aux Bois Dormants in September 2021 through Éditions Sarbacane, which received the Grand Prix de la Critique ACBD 2022, the Prix BD des Utopiales 2022, the Prix BD des librairies du Québec 2022, and the Prix du Récit Dessiné de La SCAM 2022. Her second graphic novel, Detroit Roma, co-written with Boni and published by Éditions Sabarcane in 2025, received the Prix France TV 2026. Since 2022, she has been regularly published in the magazine Métal Hurlant.

Her drawings have been exhibited at the Philippe Labaune Gallery in New York in 2023 and in Brussels at MIMA, Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art in 2024. In 2026, among other institutions, Musée de Bastia will exhibit her drawings and photography.

In 2022, she was invited by the Institut Français of India for a residency in Bangalore, and in 2023, she had a residency at the Académie de France in Rome, Villa Medicis. Then in 2024, she had a residency at the Villa Formose Immersive to write a new Virtual Reality project.

Peter Rostovsky is a Russian-born artist and writer who immigrated from the former Soviet Union to the US as a refugee in 1980. He works in a variety of disciplines that include painting, sculpture, installation, digital art, and graphic narrative. His fine art has been shown widely in the United States and abroad and has been exhibited at such venues as The Walker Art Center, MCA Santa Barbara, PS1/MOMA, Artpace, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, The ICA Philadelphia, the Blanton Museum of Art, S.M.A.K., and a host of private galleries. His writing and art criticism, under the pen name David Geers, has appeared in October, Fillip, Bomb, The Third Rail Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, and Frieze, and often focuses on the convergence of art, politics, and technology. Meanwhile, his illustrated fiction and comics-based work have appeared in the Third Rail Quarterly, Unbag, Topic, and Devil’s Due’s much-publicized Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Freshman Force and Talk Bernie to Me anthologies, as well as the Ringo Award-nominated Pandemix anthology. His debut graphic novel, Damnation Diaries (Uncivilized Books, 2023), received a 2023 MoCCA Award of Excellence, praise in Publisher’s Weekly, Artforum, Hyperallergic, BOMB, and other venues, and was listed by the New York Public Library as one of 2023’s Best Comics for Adults. It was also nominated for the prestigious 2024 Ringo Comics Industry Award in the Best Artist category. Rostovsky currently teaches at Parsons New School, New York University, and Clark University.