About
Denis Semionov, aka SaintDenis, is an internationally known new media artist, specializing in virtual and artificial intelligence art with a focus on audio-visual performance and immersive installation. Born in Russia and based in France, Denis uses his futuristic vision to continue the family legacy — artists and publishers of the early 20th‑century Russian avant‑garde.
Denis’ work combines a scientific and contemporary approach with traditional artistic practices. In his art pieces he investigates the connection between past and future through the lens of technology. His work typically explores themes such as freedom of speech and expression as well as historical, social and environmental issues.
Denis’s projects have been commissioned by major institutions and festivals worldwide and have received international recognition, including Emmy and Webby nominations as well as awards, The Drum Awards, Shorty Awards, Promax Awards, Clio Awards, Lovie Awards, Red Dot, Epica Awards, Creative Pool, and the Open Frame Award by goEast. His work has been presented at such venues as the New Museum (New York), Today Art Museum (Beijing), Times Art Museum (Chongqing), Currents Gallery (Santa Fe), IDFA DocLab (Amsterdam), Venice Film Festival — Venice Immersive, SXSW (Austin), and FARI Institute (Brussels). From 2024 Denis has been a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), the jury academy behind the Webby Awards.
Denis’s first significant artistic short for virtual reality, Between Petrov and Vodkin 1912 (2016–2017), introduced a 360° audiovisual experience that combined archival photographs and historical documents from the early 20th century to reconstruct the birth of the avant‑garde in an immersive format. The project premiered during the 69th Cannes Film Festival in the Cannes Next.
In 2018, Denis received the Grand Prix of the Open Frame Award at the international film festival goEast in Wiesbaden for The Nominal Empire, a cinematographic project created in virtual reality, for virtual reality. The interactive short explored the mechanisms of repression. By merging VR technologies with biomechanics of Meyerhold — a system of stage technique developed in the early 1920s — Denis created an immersive work that reimagined historical violence through digital embodiment.
In 2019 Denis, among five international artists, was invited to take part in the opening ceremony of WorldSkills 2019, held in a 45,000‑seat stadium, collaborating with the renowned Indian computer scientist Pranav Mistry. The live artistic show featured a real‑time, immersive artwork created directly on stage, dedicated to the idea of “the search for the future.”
The collaboration with Jean‑Michel Jarre on the New Year 2020–2021 concert Welcome to the Other Side reached an estimated 75 million viewers online and in VR, featuring a reimagined Notre‑Dame de Paris within a virtual reality environment. The immersive experience was developed to broadcast Jean‑Michel Jarre’s live performance during pandemic restrictions, offering an artistic response to the forced isolation of mass audiences and the impossibility of physical gathering. The project became a landmark case of large‑scale digital concert production, merging live music, architecture, and virtual representation.
In the Emmy‑nominated project Lessons of Auschwitz, Denis used the technology of volumetric video to conduct a social experiment on how the traumatic events of history can be retold and reimagined by future generations through digital art. The work united archival research, personal testimony, and immersive technology to create a moving digital memorial that sustains historical memory in the digital realm.
In Once a Glacier, Denis collaborated with the Chinese‑US digital artist Jiabao Li, whose work sits at the intersection of art, biology, and technology. The project was inspired by her lived experience in Alaska, where the climate crisis has become a tangible reality. Once a Glacier combined a VR game with a mixed‑media stage performance, inviting audiences to experience the fragility of glacial ecosystems and the limits of human agency in the face of environmental collapse.
In Sound and Machines, Denis used artificial intelligence to create a generative video art project combining music, visual effects, and abstract audiovisual forms. The abstract shapes and colors were generated by custom algorithms, producing a cinematic story shaped by the interaction of artist and machine. Dedicated to the phenomenon of little‑studied exoplanets, the project visualized the unknown through a language of synthetic forms and was exhibited at Beyond Basel during Art Basel Miami in 2023.
In 2024, Denis Semionov was invited to TEDx Brussels as both artist and speaker, presenting the AI art installation Feelings and Sensors. Developed in collaboration with FARI — AI for the Common Good Institute, the project examined the future of privacy, security, and individual freedom in the city as smart technologies and AI spread. Denis shot real photographs of Brussels during his visit and then processed them through neural networks, projecting his own vision of the future onto the city’s recognizable architecture. The resulting AI installation was presented on stage at the Théâtre National Wallonie‑Bruxelles.
In 2025, Denis took part in the ArtTech research project AI Hokusai, inspired by the legacy of the Japanese artist and educator Katsushika Hokusai. Supported by the French architectural studio NADK, which created a dedicated virtual museum for the project, Denis produced Demons and Monsters, an AI art music installation that reimagined Hokusai’s One Hundred Ghost Stories through the lens of artificial intelligence. By using neural networks Denis generated new imagery and soundscapes, transforming heritage iconography into a contemporary digital artwork that explored the persistence of myths in the age of AI.
In Primairy Forest, a hybrid AI installation, Denis investigates the theme of the Amazonian rainforest, extending ongoing ecological and political concerns into the digital realm. The project was inspired by the music album Amazonia by Jean‑Michel Jarre and his collaboration with the photographer Sebastião Salgado, who passed away in 2025. Denis generated over 1,000 images of the rainforest, constructing an image‑driven installation that documents the fragile and endangered ecosystem through algorithmic landscapes. The project premiered at the Festival Amazonia del Plata in Buenos Aires and was supported by the Institut Français Morocco.
In Futurist Archive in Motion, Denis draws on over fifty photographs of Russian futurists from the pre‑revolutionary period to create a video chronicle that never existed historically. The archival images are revived through neural networks, while futuristic drawings are transformed into animation and the voices of poets are reconstructed. The result is not a documentary, but an atmospheric reconstruction of the revolutionary moment that gave rise to the avant‑garde art.
