N.M. Milkovich is an artist based in the Chicago area whose work examines the visual language of protest—how symbols, gestures, and collective actions emerge, circulate, and persist across borders. Working across sculpture, installation, and digital media, Milkovich investigates how political movements generate shared iconographies and how those forms shift meaning as they move between communities.

Drawing from direct participation in demonstrations in the United States, Milkovich approaches protest not only as a political act, but as a form of visual and spatial production: a living system of images, bodies, and environments that communicate urgency, solidarity, and dissent. Their recent work engages sites of state power and resistance, translating ephemeral protest moments into physical form through projection, fabrication, and installation. These works ask what remains after the crowd disperses—how memory, violence, and resistance can be held, reactivated, or contested through material.

Central to this practice is an interest in transnational protest culture, particularly how younger generations construct shared symbolic languages across geographic distance. Milkovich traces the migration of images—drawn from popular culture, political history, and grassroots invention—as they are adopted, reinterpreted, and weaponized within different संघर्ष contexts. These symbols function simultaneously as tools of unity and disruption, collapsing boundaries between the local and the global.

Milkovich’s interdisciplinary background in engineering and visual art informs both their conceptual and material approach. They hold a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University and an MFA in Visual Art (Sculpture) from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. This training manifests in a practice that incorporates industrial processes, digital fabrication, and time-based media, often balancing precision with instability to mirror the tensions between institutional control and collective resistance.

They have participated in residencies at Cobertizo, Koik Contemporary, and Radio28 in Mexico; MERZ Gallery in Scotland; and Residency Unlimited and Artist Alliance Inc in New York City. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including at CICA Museum in South Korea.

Milkovich is currently an Assistant Professor of Physics and 3D Design at North Central College and also teaches engineering at the College of DuPage. They have been invited to lecture on their work at Yale’s Quantum Institute.