What inspires my art

It may come off as an unexpected way of starting an artist blog post, but truth be told, art mostly helps me stay sane as a mother.  This is one of the many reasons I brought it back into my life after letting it fall by the wayside for more than a decade.  It helps... Continue Reading →

Using SciArt to battle stress and find hope

This blog post was originally published on Lifeology on 5/10/20. Art has at least seven different functions, according to Alain de Botton and John Armstrong’s “Art as Therapy”: 1) Remembering, 2) Hope, 3) Sorrow, 4) Rebalancing, 5) Self-Understanding, 6) Growth, and 7) Appreciation. Art helps us to remember the past, hope for something better and process our feelings. Last year, before hearing about... Continue Reading →

Choosing art, science or both

My initial art was centered around trauma at the cellular level. Several years later, this work came to represent a painful personal experience.

Evolution of 3-dimensional beadwork: Lessons learned – Part II

This post is the continuation of Part I of my exploration of my methods development. If you have missed it, I recommend you start here. Moving forward, in "Tortured", "Abyss", "Hope", "The Void" and "Attraction" I started building much larger 3-dimensional structures. It was quite challenging to make them stay up and not lose their... Continue Reading →

Art as Therapy

In November 2019, I was invited as one of the speakers at the SciVizNYC Symposium at my grad school alma mater - Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The program gathered people from a wide array of professions, ranging from surgeons to medical illustrators to fine artists, and gave a great overview of how... Continue Reading →

“The Mind” – an artistic experiment – Part II

This work and its counterpart started out as a little sketch in my bullet journal.  I had the idea of creating two "identical" pictures.  One showing empty space in the shape of a neuron and the other being its mirror image that is filled with an actual cell.  Here's the birth certificate of this idea.... Continue Reading →

“The Void” – an artistic experiment – Part I

Following my "Stages of Grief" series, I have set out to create a piece to represent the very first stage - DENIAL.  While in my earlier pieces I did my best to stay true to scientific form, here I have come to border abstraction.  This piece turns the biology on its head, showing the outline of a... Continue Reading →

So grateful for this feedback

This quote was recently posted on Facebook in association with my latest piece "Sunrise". I am so thankful for the kind words from one of my customers Carla Harris! "I love the art of Yana Zorina, a neuroscientist whose artworks are inspired by her field of scientific research. I have been following this blog for... Continue Reading →

“Sunrise”

One of the major challenges in the field of neuroscience is the poor ability of neurons to regenerate after acute injury.  Conditions such as spinal cord injury sever the neuronal connections, leading to permanent paralysis with no treatments currently available.  After birth, the vast majority of neurons lose their ability to divide and create new cells,... Continue Reading →

“Hope”

Ever since going through a traumatic experience in 2017, I have been working on expressing my emotions through art. In 2017, I created "Tortured", where the nerve scar represents a shocking life event that acts as a significant barrier to moving forward. Despite its presence, some brave growth tips manage to break through. They show resilience,... Continue Reading →

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