Olesya Turkina (b. 1961, Kozelsk, Russia) is a curator and critic who lives and works in Saint Petersburg. She graduated in Art History from the Leningrad State University and holds a PhD in the History of Art. She has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Contemporary Art of the State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg since, and a senior lecturer in Interdisciplinary Research and Art Practices at the Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St Petersburg State University (est. 2014). She has worked on numerous exhibitions, including MIR: Made in the 20th Century, Russian Pavilion, 48th Venice Biennale, Venice (1999), Necrorealism, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2011), Beyond Zero, Calvert 22 Foundation, London (2014). She is the author of over 200 publications on contemporary art, including The Life of the Remarkable Monroe (with Viktor Mazin, 2014) and Soviet Space Dogs (2014). She is a member of the Russian Cosmonautics Federation.