About
Nova Hynes (AKA Maria Romanova Hynes) is a researcher and visual artist, currently pursuing a PhD in Visual Media and Environmental Humanities at Leiden University. Her photographic and scholarly work has been featured in various peer-reviewed publications. Her short films and screenplays have become winners and finalists at the 54th Nashville Film Festival, the 24th Kerry International Film Festival, New York Script Awards, and the Lonely Wolf International Film Festival, among many others.
She is an alumna of Leiden University (MA Film and Photographic Studies, cum laude) and Trinity College Dublin (MSc Interactive Digital Media, BA English Studies, First Class Honours). In addition, she spent a year at the National University of Singapore, where she studied classical and ritual Asian drama.
She is based in West Cork, Ireland.
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Nova’s artistic practice revolves around the themes of identity and alterity, opposition and juxtaposition, belonging and non-belonging, materiality and immateriality, the event and its aftermath.
In her creative writing, she mostly focuses on drama. In recent years, she co-wrote several short and feature scripts and is currently working on an anthology film project. In 2023, her short film script Noa's Place was awarded Best Short Screenplay at the Sunday Shorts Film Festival and won Finalist accolades at the 54th Nashville Film Festival, the 24th Kerry International Film Festival and the 17th Waterford International Film Festival.
In her photography, Nova frequently employs double exposure to create images both spectral and melancholy. Her art and documentary projects were exhibited at Oisín Gallery (2011), the Twisted Pepper (2012), and Temple Bar Gallery (2014) in Dublin and featured in The Calvert Journal, Icarus Magazine, TN2, and Leiden Elective Academic Periodical. For an example of Nova’s artistic research through photography, please read “On Photographing Nature: From Mimesis to Play“ (LEAP, 2022). To learn why she chose film photography as her primary medium, see “Fleeting Beauty: Perfect, Ephemeral Moments Caught on Film” (The Calvert Journal, 2013).
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Nova works within a deconstructivist methodological framework, examining the representation of traumatic absences and analysing the performativity of the photographic image. She further investigates the spectator’s affective response to the portrayal of trauma while conceptualising spectatorial experience as an act of witnessing.
She has published a number of scholarly papers in peer-reviewed journals, including Arts (MDPI) and Leiden Elective Academic Periodical.
Nova was on the Editorial Board of the peer-reviewed journal Leiden Elective Academic Periodical in 2022 and acted as the Creative Writing Editor of The Trinity Journal of Literary Translation between 2014 and 2015. She was also the sole translator of the established Russian Journal of Philosophy & Humanities (Logos), which produced its first English volume in 2017.
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Nova was the owner and co-founder of Amsterdam's first plastic-free shop (with a vegan cafe) Little Plant Pantry. She ran the business together with her partner Winter Romanov Hynes for three consecutive years before selling it in 2022.
The shop was nominated for the Vegan Awards 2021 by the Dutch Association for Veganism (NVV) and featured as one of the outstanding social enterprises at The Impact Days 2020. Earlier that year, Nova presented the pitch “Business as a Platform for Change” at TEDxAmsterdam Women Talent Night 2020.
To find out more about Nova and Winter's activism and experience, please read their interviews in The Earth Issue and Bright Vibes.
Contact
novahynes at gmail.com