Irina Nakhova was born in 1955 in Moscow. From 1972 to 1978 she studied at the Moscow Printing Institute at the Faculty of Graphic Design. During these same years, she communicated with friends and studied with Viktor Pivovarov, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. Since those years, he has been part of the circle of “Moscow Conceptualism”. She was married to Andrei Monastyrsky. She did not participate in informal and apartment exhibitions, but starting in 1983 she created installation-environments “Room” in her apartment, which became the first experiments in working in this spatial art form in the Soviet Union. They are associated not only with the practices of conceptualism, but also refer to the spatial projects of El Lissitzky and Kurt Schwitters. In turn, Nakhova’s “Rooms” had a huge influence on the art of other artists. At the same time, Nakhova, like a number of other conceptual artists in the USSR, collaborates with children's literature publishers, creating book illustrations. Nakhova designed over 50 books. With these works she was accepted into the Union of Artists of the USSR in 1986. During perestroika he takes part in many key exhibitions. In 1992 he moved to the USA, where he actively collaborates with galleries and institutions and implements many of his projects. During these years, he works mainly with installation and object, including innovative techniques (for example, inflatable objects made of parachute silk), as well as photography and video art. Winner of numerous awards and scholarships; the most significant is the Kandinsky Prize (2013). In 2015, she became the first female artist to receive a personal project in the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In the 2010s, a number of large-scale museum exhibitions of Nakhova took place. Lives in New Jersey, USA and Moscow.