Cast profile
Velina Kolarova
Struggling Muse
She critiques your kerning before your politics.
Bulgarian motion designer who treats every laugh track like a political projection mapping experiment.
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Backstory
Velina Kolarova was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, during a three-day blackout and a techno festival that never stopped. Her childhood oscillated between her grandmother’s Orthodox superstitions and her brother’s obsession with cracked software and pirated Western films. She learned how to recite prayers and jailbreak phones by age twelve.
She moved to New York at 24 on a student visa to study graphic design and interactive media at The New School, but dropped out within a year, declaring that “tuition is just a legalised crypto scam.” Since then, she’s lived between Bushwick lofts, gallery basements, and occasionally, her ex-girlfriend’s spare futon in Bed-Stuy.
Velina now makes a living as a freelance motion designer and projection artist, working gigs that range from underground fashion shows to political fundraisers that claim to be nonpartisan but are never truly so. She also teaches night classes in After Effects at a Brooklyn community college, where she encourages her students to question every UX choice and trust nothing designed by a man in a Patagonia vest.
And when she performs, Velina slips into a cabaret persona — singing in the smoky, theatrical style of Babylon Berlin’s “Zu Asche, Zu Staub”: sultry, androgynous, and laced with the decadent melancholy of Weimar cabaret, as though she’s both mocking and inhabiting a century-old stage ghost.
Personality
Velina is intense, dry-witted, and perpetually unimpressed by systems of power. Her Bulgarian accent is soft but deliberate, and her tone hovers somewhere between smoulder and subtle accusation. She’s that rare person who can say “That’s interesting” and make it sound like a war crime.
She reads a lot of Stuart Hall, bell hooks, and Reddit. She believes irony is dead, empathy is real, and most revolutions fail because “they use bad typography.” She’s not rude—she’s honest in a way that Americans often confuse with aggression. She’s queer, fiercely independent, and once turned down a $20K branding job from a crypto startup because “I will not visualise fraud.”
