Isabella Dobrovolska

A child of Los Angeles, Isabella Dobrovolska grew up at a kitchen table where three languages tangled together at once, moving between Russian and Mexican immigrant households that never fully separated from one another. Learning to translate between worlds without a shared language, she came to understand from an early age that meaning shifts depending on who is doing the telling, and what gets lost or carried over in that exchange. That instinct now shapes her as a filmmaker and photographer between New York and Los Angeles, whose work weaves her multicultural background into a space between fiction and reality. She draws heavily from surrealism, both as an artistic movement and as a way of bending the real just enough to reveal something true beneath it, alongside the myths and folklore of her cultures. Working across fashion commercial, narrative, and documentary film, she directs most of her focus toward visual storytelling while building a photography practice alongside it. She graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a B.F.A. in Film and Television Production and a minor in Producing, and her work continues to form the thread that quietly connects where she comes from to what she sees. Her visual language draws as much from the myths and folklore of her cultures as it does from the environments around her, always searching for the thread that quietly connects them.