Chicago-based artist Alexandra Zizmor creates portraits that explore the charged space between appearance and identity. Drawing inspiration from the graphic immediacy of Pop Art and Japanese woodblock prints, her paintings are defined by bold color, flattened space, decorative pattern, and decisive line. Her subjects, ranging from family and friends to imagined and mythic figures, inhabit a narrative world that is at once intimate and iconic. Her mask-like, enigmatic figures suggest how self-presentation can serve as both armor and performance.

Zizmor’s artistic path grew out of a longstanding engagement with the art world as both a collector and student, interests she pursued alongside a corporate career. After earning an M.A. in Modern Art Connoisseurship from Christie’s Education in New York, she drew on that foundation to create work of her own. Her debut solo exhibition of mixed-media works at the Derfner Judaica Museum in New York drew critical attention, including recognition from The New Yorker. As her professional responsibilities increased, Zizmor stepped away from the studio, returning to artmaking with renewed focus after retiring in 2021.

Her work was featured in the 2024 Art for Life Chicago exhibition at Chicago’s Merchandise Mart and has also been shown at AIR Studio + Gallery in Glencoe, Illinois. Zizmor’s paintings are held in private collections, and two pieces from her Chasing Beauty series will appear in the forthcoming book the design of me by the late Ron Kovach, former president of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Architecture and Design Society.