Lichtzier is a scholar and a curator of modern and contemporary art. In her exhibitions, writing, and pedagogy, she often focuses on the relationship between art, politics, and institutional forms of oppression.
Ruslana migrated between three continents, three languages, and three political regimes. This movement of ongoing rifts formed alienating distances and close encounters with state regimes of terror. The first was totalitarian, as she was born in Siberia, USSR, followed by a Democratic Apartheid as she immigrated at the age of seven to Israel. Today, in Chicago, in the margins of a quivering Empire, this unhomely distance bestows upon her a commitment to an ethical state of statelessness.
At Northwestern, Lichtzier is a doctoral candidate in Art History as well as a Mellon fellow in MENA Studies, and in Critical Theory Studies. In her Ph.D., she studies the construction and deconstruction of contemporary coloniality in Palestine and Israel, focusing specifically on the formation of Israeli nature and anti-colonial practices that dismantle it.