Anna Frants (Russian: А́нна Алекса́ндровна Фра́нц; born 1 October 1965) is a Russian-American multimedia artist, curator, and art collector. She is the founder of nonprofit cultural foundation "Cyland Foundation Inc." and "CYLAND" MediaArtLab, and is director of "Frants Gallery" (New York, United States).
The mastering of computer graphics and animation marked the beginning of her enthusiasm for new media, new media art and technologies in art and the concentration of her interests on the transition from traditional classical methods to cyberarts that was afforded unlimited possibilities by the rapidly developing internet.
In 1997, she married Leonid Frants. Their son Daniil became the youngest artist at CYLAND MediaArtLab: when he was only twelve, he created, as part of Cyfest, an international educational game program for children, the workshop "Humanizing Robots", which he held in Russia, Germany, Japan, the United States and Ukraine.
In addition to continuous exhibition activities as an artist and a curator in the United States, Saint Petersburg, Europe and Japan, in 2010, Anna traveled to the Polar Region as a member of the international group of artists within the program "The Arctic Circle" organized by the Canadian government. The program's purpose was to afford the artists an opportunity to visit hard-to-reach places of the Polar Region that are mostly known through scientific reports, which would subsequently allow them to create art projects based on their impressions of the region. In addition to the video footage filmed by Anna, that trip resulted in her interactive project Trembling Creatures, exhibited at the group show of participants of those annual expeditions that opened in May 2014 at the "1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery" in New York.
Cyfest-14 FERMENT Arts + Ecology Festival, Dartington Trust, Dartington UK 2021
ID. ART:TECH Exhibition at the National Arts Club, New York, US 2020
Weather Forecast: Digital Cloudiness - Reggia di Caserta, Italy, 2018.
Personal Spaces – Interactive Multimedia Works by Anna Frants, Carla Gannis, Alexandra Dementieva, Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov. National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York, 2018.
HYBRIS, Monsters and Hybrids in Contemporary Art, University Ca' Foscari, Venice, 2017.
PERSONAL STRUCTURES - Open Borders. Venice, Italy, 2017
Patterns of the Mind, Convergence, London, 2016.
Nargifsus, Transfer Gallery, New York, 2016.
Made in Ancient Greece, Sergey Kuryokhin Center for Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, 2016.
The Other Home, Made in NY Media Center by IFP, New York, 2015.
Trembling Creatures, SIGGRAPH ASIA, 2011, Hong Kong.
Unforeseen, Nailya Alexander Gallery, New York City, USA
Selected artworks
Frants's media installation Amabie combines an animated figure inspired by Japanese folklore with live webcam images from locations around the world. A version incorporating a neural network was exhibited in Symbiosis: Art in the Age of AI at the Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery in New York in 2025.
Different Robot — installation, 2025.
To Make a Long Story Short — installation, 2024.
Obstinacy and persistence, Installation, 2023.
Vagaries of affection, multimedia installation, 2023.
Trembling Creatures and Polar Bear Feeder were made as a result of the trip to the Polar circle as a member of the Canadian art expedition "The Arctic Circle" in 2009.
Artworks by Anna Frants are presented by Borey Gallery (Saint Petersburg, Russia), Dam Stuhltrager Gallery (New York, United States, and Berlin, Germany) and Barbarian Gallery (Zürich, Switzerland). Her works are in the collections of the New York Museum of Arts and Design, State Russian Museum, Kyosei-no-Sato Museum (Japan), Kolodzei Art Foundation, Sergey Kuryokhin Center for Contemporary Art and in numerous private collections all over the world.
Curatorial activities
The most notable of Frants' curatorial works were the retrospective exhibitions "Sterligov's Group", 2006, New York, and "Art around the Barracks", 2003, New York.
In the documentary of Andrey Zagdansky "Konstantin and Mouse", dedicated to Konstantin Kuzminsky, one of the episodes was filmed at the opening night of "Art around the Barracks" at Frants Gallery in Soho.
Among contemporary artists, who constantly collaborate with Anna Frants as a curator, are Vitaly Pushnitsky, Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov, Alexander Kozhin, Alexander Terebenin, Marina Koldobskaya, Alexandra Dementieva, Peter Belyi, Petr Shvetsov.
Frants was among the curators of Natura Naturans: Human Beings, Nature, Landscape, presented as part of CYFEST 17 at the MOMus–Experimental Center for the Arts in Thessaloniki from 27 November 2025 to 25 January 2026.
CYLAND MediaArtLab
In 2006, Anna Frants together with Marina Koldobskaya founded the international media lab "СYLAND".
Since 2007, CYLAND has organised CYFEST, an international media art festival held in different countries.
The use of computers allows the artist to break away from the deterministic nature of traditional art forms... Computer art is often similar to conceptual art from the point of view of intellectual judgment: the viewer needs to understand the artist's intentions. This understanding is even more important in interactive projects because the way we react depends on our ability to understand the artist's idea and expectations. The cyberart is challenging because it is based on the technologies and the means that are less intuitive for us and new in their form... Each innovative work gives us a new perspective for understanding the infinitely expanding universe of art and teaches us to understand its creative glossary.
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Nonprofit foundation "CYLAND Foundation"
In 1999, Anna and Leonid Frants created the nonprofit foundation "CYLAND Foundation" that is still active. Its purpose was the representation in New York of the artists from Leningrad/St. Petersburg who have been working there from the postwar 1950s until the present time. The primary focus was on the so-called Leningrad underground — the unique and underexplored cultural phenomenon of the 1970s and the artistic and social environment that brought if forth.
Gradually, the scope of activities of "Frants Gallery Space" expanded and started including not just the traditional genres, such as painting, sculpture and graphics, but also the art associated with the latest technologies: cyberart, video art, computer animation, interactive installations as well as performance art.
Collection
The collection's creation was a natural extension of the development of "CYLAND Foundation". Since 1998, Anna and Leonid Frants have been collecting works of visual arts of Leningrad underground. Their current collection also includes sculptures, assemblages, photographs, videos, objects of actual art and archival materials.
In January 2013, the Department of Contemporary Art at the Hermitage Museum organized, as a part of the project "Actual Art of St. Petersburg, A Retrospective", the exhibition "Simple Rules". It showcased works from Russian and foreign private collections.
Works from the Frants Family Collection were exhibited alongside works from the Costakis Collection in Natura Naturans: Human Beings, Nature, Landscape at MOMus in Thessaloniki in 2025–2026.
