Curators

The 2025 festival is organised and produced by Helsinki Events Foundation. Lux Helsinki’s artistic director is Juha Rouhikoski, whose curator team also includes Mia Kivinen, Anna Nykyri and Kirsi Pitkänen

Mia Kivinen is an MA level lighting designer and curator. She has earlier curated the Lyhtypuisto and Ilon kuvia works for the Senate Square in Lux Helsinki. For her, the best thing in Lux Helsinki has been listening to how you can say “Kato nyt totakin!” in different intonations. Kivinen is a founder member of the Finnish Light Art Society FLASH and teaches light art to all types of audiences. Her hobbies are light art travel and writing about it. If Kivinen doesn’t talk about light art for 15 minutes, she’s probably dozed off.

Visual artist, documentary film director, and screenwriter, she lives and works in Helsinki. Nykyri holds an MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Art and an MA in Choreography from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London. Nykyri uses moving image to create documentary films, cinematic video and sound installations, and choreographic environments. Her works often explore political and corporeal themes, covering questions of gender, power, and control. She has participated in a number of residencies such as ISCP, New York; Barbican Center, London; Cité des Arts, Paris.

Kirsi Pitkänen is a visual artist, curator, and public art consultant based in Jyväskylä, Finland, working through her company Art Impact. Pitkänen’s artistic work focuses particularly on performance and installation art, and her works have been exhibited at events such as the Shanghai World Expo, ANTI Contemporary Art Festival, the international SLUSH event, and Mänttä Art Festival. She frequently incorporates light into her works, considering it an essential element in terms of content, spatiality, and experience. In recent years, Pitkänen has concentrated on coordinating and curating public art projects integrated into the built environment. She manages large-scale artistic projects, for instance, in the Kangas area of Jyväskylä and in the Ahvenisto Hospital project in Hämeenlinna. While serving as Regional Artist for Visual Arts in Central Finland from 2014 to 2016, Pitkänen organized multidisciplinary events in urban spaces, acting as both artistic director and executive producer. In 2018, the City of Jyväskylä awarded her the “Open Urban Environment” recognition. According to the awarding jury, Pitkänen’s vision, productivity, and ability to transcend boundaries provide an excellent example for professionals across various fields working on urban development.

As a curator for the Finnish Light Art Society FLASH, Pitkänen aims to create a multi-disciplinary, multi-sensory, experiential, and spatial entity for Kanneltalo. The Finnish Light Art Society FLASH was founded in 2017 to promote light art and its practitioners in Finland and internationally. The society’s mission is to connect light artists across art forms, lower the threshold for engaging with light art, support the professional development of light artists, and disseminate knowledge about light art to event organizers and the public.

Juha Rouhikoski is Lux Helsinki’s artistic director and curator. He holds a Master’s degree in theatre and drama and is currently pursuing a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. He works as production manager at Verkatehdas in Hämeenlinna, and he is passionate about exercise, fly fishing and self-development. “As Lux Helsinki’s artistic director, I have an important and high-profile opportunity to promote light art in Finland and beyond. Lux Helsinki is a light art festival pioneer that’s highly regarded internationally. My aim is to help make Lux the most interesting and attractive light art festival in the world.”