Chkadua is a painter who was born Soviet Georgia and has been based in New York since 1992. About her work, Lilly Wei writes that she "uses her many invented personae to create a construct of contemporary feminine identity, a container for social and cultural values that are... Georgian [and] in dialogue with the multiple perspectives and displacements that characterize many of today's peripatetic artists... These are autobiographical works, even a travelogue of sorts, a semiotics of high and low tourism keyed to events in her life as they unfold with flashbacks that recall and reinvent the country she has left, like Hollywood movie posters updated.'