Nadia Mytnik-Frantova

Nadia Mytnik-Frantova is a Montreal-based designer, illustrator, and media artist pursuing a Master of Design at Concordia University. Her research focuses on the philosophy of art, the impact of emerging AI technologies on artistic expression, and the question of human authorship.

Alongside her graduate research, Nadia teaches Graphic Design and maintains a
multidisciplinary practice informed by her training at the Moscow State University of Printing Arts and Concordia’s Film Animation program.

Nadia's work spans illustration,
graphic design, painting, and mixed-media film, with her short animated works having been screened nationally and internationally.

Her creative interests center on memory, perception, mythology, and narrative image- making, with particular emphasis on the expressive possibilities of mixed media. This focus has led her to explore generative AI not only for its novelty, but for what it reveals about human creativity–how embodied intuition and language continue to shape artistic
processes even when working with machine systems.

She approaches AI not as an autonomous creative agent, but as a translative tool, framing the relationship between artist and machine through the metaphor of puppetry, in which AI performs as a puppet animated and structured by the human puppeteer. Drawing on this theatrical framework, she explores how translating AI-generated imagery into
material form and moving it beyond the screen may imbue the work with a sense
presence and aura and situate it within a human-centered lineage of visual arts.