Lizi Budagashvili

Lizi Budagashvili (b. 2000) is an artist born and raised in Tbilisi, Georgia, where she recently moved from New York City. She earned her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2025 and her BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design in 2023. She has held solo exhibitions internationally, including Kaleidoscope at Wohlleb Gallery in Vienna and Fireflies at Vernissage Gallery in Tbilisi. Budagashvili is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2019, 2020). She has held solo exhibitions including Kaleidoscope at ‘Wohleb’ Gallery, Vienna (2024); Fireflies at Vernissage Gallery, Tbilisi (2023); Poetic Mysteries at the Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi (2019); and Mélange at Vernissage Gallery, Tbilisi (2021). She has also participated in the Tbilisi Art Fair in 2022, 2024, and 2026.

Influenced by leaving her native Georgia at seventeen, Lizi Budagashvili’s work explores childhood, nostalgia, and the complex experience of navigating multiple "homes." By abstracting distant, unreliable recollections, she builds ethereal dreamscapes using transparent veils, stained surfaces, and magical folk creatures. These realms blur the lines between past and present, dream and reality, inviting viewers into a comforting yet haunting nostalgia rooted not in a tangible place, but in an imagined homeland.