About ...

Olga Starostina is a Houston Metal and Mixed Media artist, born in Moscow, Russia. Olga was born into a family of engineers. “Handy” work was a tradition in her family. Her father would repair all electronic equipment in the house and she used to watch him solder electronic parts of broken TVs and radios. Her mother made her own clothes and taught Olga how to sew from an early age. She made clothes, sewed curtains, cast lead figures with her father and participated in every craft activity at summer camp. Making things by hand was considered a way of life and never thought of as a possible future career in her family. So, she became a computer systems engineer.

It was not until she moved to United States to procure her master’s degree in Library and Information Science at LSU and took some design classes that she re-discovered her passion for art and making. Upon graduating and moving to Houston Olga studied metalsmithing at the Glassell School of Art under Sandie Zilker for more than 9 years, metalsmithing techniques and then going through advanced study topics in contemporary jewelry and metalsmithing.

Upon graduating and moving to Houston Olga studied jewelry at the Glassell School of Art under Sandie Zilker for more than 9 years studying all aspects of traditional metalsmithing from fabrication to casting to advanced jewelry and special topics. Casting has always been her favorite metalsmithing process. During her experimentation with free casting aluminum, she fell in love with this underappreciated metal, which stated her career as an art jeweler.

Olga has exhibited throughout North America at the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City, Museum of Art and Design (MAD) in New York, Indiana University at Kokomo, Velvet da Vinci in San Francisco, SNAG in Toronto, Equinox Gallery in San Antonio, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and the Glassell School of Art in Houston.

Olga’s work is in a number of private collections throughout Texas. Currently, Olga continues to combine her science and art education working both as a jeweler/mixed media artist and as a Business Systems Analyst at MD Anderson Cancer Center.