A Balkan mountain child and a young arts protege who grew up to become a world renown contemporary artist with a PhD in art history. Iva Troj grew up in the outskirts of Bulgaria’s Romani slums in the last decade of communism – a world full of predators, communist propaganda and censorship. Today, she is a Gerety Award winner and 3 times Cannes Lions nominee for her Halo Masterpiece [biggest ever launch in the Halo franchise’s history, with more than 20M players, 520M reach], Towry Best of England Award winner, and 2 times Contemporary Art Excellence Artist of the Year award winner. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally and her work is in collections in the UK, France, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, China, United States and Japan. In 2021, her epic painting Halo Infinite Masterpiece was exhibited at Saatchi Gallery and The Louvre. In 2020, her paintings were included in a number of permanent museum exhibitions in South Asia, among them Haegeumgang Museum 해금강테마박물관 in South Korea. And in Sept 2022, she was invited to exhibit a body of work at The Louvre in Paris.Troj obtained her first fine arts degree when she was just 17 years old. After completing two BA degrees and a master’s degree from the United States and Sweden, she was awarded an art history PhD title. She is widely known for her fine art pieces which seamlessly merge Renaissance aesthetics and techniques with postmodern praxis. Her intensely detailed oil paintings achieve astonishing tricks of light and shade, as practiced by the great masters. Exhausted by a society in which women often feel vulnerable, threatened, or powerless, Troj recasts the fairer sex as powerful creatures, freed from the oppressive male gaze and placed within Edenic settings where they can revel in their own beauty and potential. Blending abstraction with figuration, the natural world with the urban landscape, dream with reality, Troj’s breathtakingly beautiful artworks achieve something truly unique, both in terms of aesthetics and concept.