About Victoria Unikel
Victoria Unikel is a Soviet-born American artist and media mogul. She builds worlds — in image, sound, film and print — and then builds the companies that let them live beyond the frame.
She grew up in the Soviet Union with no money and no connections, in a cold flat where nothing about the life she has now was available or even imaginable. It had not always been that way. Her mother’s family had been wealthy — land, factories — and when the communists took power everything was confiscated and the family was exiled to Siberia, branded “enemies of the people.” When Victoria was one year old her father was sentenced to thirteen years for “embezzlement of state property” — a fabricated case, the kind the Soviet state built against families it had already marked. He served more than ten years; she grew up while he was in prison. Decades later the state formally rehabilitated them — her father, and the family it had exiled — admitting, in writing, that none of it should ever have happened. That beginning is not a footnote to her story; it is the reason she has never accepted anyone else’s limits on what one person is allowed to build. Her rise from that flat to a self-made fortune has been covered by The Independent, The Sun, indy100, Wales Online and Daily Star.
Her training was classical and it was serious. With no money, no connections and no one to speak for her, she was accepted to study cello at the Gnessin School of Music in Moscow — one of the most demanding music schools in the Soviet Union — on what the school called a rare talent, and on the perfect pitch that would later define her singing. She graduated, and went on to study acting at GITIS, the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts, where she graduated with honors. She is a professional cellist and a mezzo-soprano. The discipline of those years, the hours alone with an instrument before anyone was watching, runs through everything she has made since.
She was performing in public long before she was an adult. While still at school, she was giving concerts, playing philharmonic openings and singing live on television. In her teens she modeled for Modus Vivendis.
As an actress she has appeared in numerous films and television productions and performed on stages in the United States, France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine, in lead and supporting roles. Her television work includes long-running series that ran to sixty and ninety episodes. Her full screen credits are listed on IMDb.
In music she has been writing, performing and releasing for more than twenty years. She created and produced the gothic rock band “Exorcist,” composing its music and writing its lyrics — a project aimed directly at the Soviet communist legacy. She performed in the industrial project “Unikel” and the darkwave project “Balance.” She has played live for audiences of thousands, and her music has been featured in international films. Her catalog is published by The Orchard, a subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment; independently of that catalog, her albums have sold more than 200,000 copies. She is the founder of Unikel Records, an independent label for dark cinematic music, and today she composes and produces the soundtracks for the EXORCISTA Universe — hardcore, hard techno, industrial and phonk, one album per story. Listen & watch →
As UNIKEL she has been painting and exhibiting in galleries since 2008, working across painting, mixed media, photography and sculpture. Her collections — MONEY, WAR, GENDER, NEW YORK and the mixed-media DIAMONDS — are channeled, activist works that take on subjects most people would rather leave alone: money and what it does to people, war and its cost, gender and the rules written around it. She works with real materials — gold, blood, diamonds — and each release draws press. She is the founder of Trancerealism, a movement in which the work is made through a channelling connection with the Universe rather than through observation. Her paintings have sold at celebrity charity auctions, including for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, she has shown during Art Basel in Miami, and in 2019 her work took the top art prize at the MOSAIC Federation gala at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York.
Her activism was not limited to the canvas. In 2009 she organized a public protest calling for Lenin’s removal from Red Square — the same argument she had been making in paint and in sound, made in the street.
She is the creator, artist and producer of EXORCISTA — a dark universe that began as a single show and has grown into four. Games of Souls is the flagship dark anime; Dark Fairytales is an anime anthology of the fairytales as they were before they were made comfortable; Secrets, Spells & Shadows is the original horror and true crime podcast, with two full seasons in the archive; and Magic Lab tests real rituals on camera and documents what happens. Around them sit original soundtracks and the Grimoire book series. The universe has more than 133,000 subscribers and a YouTube Silver Creator Award (2026).
As a writer she has authored screenplays and books. Her debut novel, Emma + Luke = Disappear to Nowhere, is a full-length sci-fi adventure for readers aged nine and up and the first in a series: two ordinary students from the oldest city in America find an ancient portal hidden in a basement and walk into a galaxy that has been running social experiments on Earth for centuries. The book is distributed in over 50 countries in paperback, hardcover and ebook formats and has been covered by ELLE, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Star and The Sun. A full-color manga edition is in production, and Book Two is on the way. She is also the author of the EXORCISTA Grimoire book series.
She produces film, music, animation and media, and runs a film studio with more than twenty years of feature films and documentaries behind it — a repeat participant of the Cannes and Venice international film festivals.
In business she is President and co-founder of VUGA Group, a portfolio of 17 companies operating across 4 continents. In media, television and PR the group includes VUGA Media Group, VUGA PR Services, FashionBrava, VUGA TV, Virtuoso TV, Gossip Stone TV, 24Fashion TV, VUGA Enterprises and VUGA Publishing. In technology, AI and engineering: AgentPrizm, ViralPrizm, LogisticsPrizm, Edison Aerospace, Shoreline Protection and Black Swan. In film and music: Apollo Film Production and Unikel Records. And in philanthropy, the VUGA Foundation.
None of it started as an empire. It started with VUGA Enterprises and a few online magazines covering entertainment. Then came PR — placing stories for others — which grew into a practice that today delivers guaranteed placement across 1,400 publications, from Forbes, Time and Variety to Vogue and The Hollywood Reporter. Television arrived in parallel: 24Fashion TV and Gossip Stone TV became media sponsors of fashion weeks around the world, and VUGA TV, the flagship, now carries top Hollywood content. Company by company — each one built to solve what the previous one uncovered — one business became seventeen.
Its four television networks are available on 600M+ devices worldwide on iOS, Android, Android TV and many other platforms, and its digital network operates 100+ newspapers and magazines. Forbes and Daily Mail have called her a media mogul.
Fashion is not new ground for her: from 2008 to 2012 she ran her own clothing line in Germany. Her current project is FashionBrava, the professional network for everyone who makes fashion — the visual world of Instagram and the professional power of IMDbPro in one place — launching in September 2026.
She is President of the VUGA Foundation, a 501(c)(3) art non-profit supporting emerging contemporary artists through exhibitions, film production, cultural programs, festivals and art therapy, with a public art museum in preparation. She has worked with the AIDS Foundation in Berlin and the Make-A-Wish Foundation in the United States, and she is an advocate for the LGBT community.
Her work has appeared in Forbes, Daily Mail, New York Post, L’Officiel, The Independent, The Sun, ELLE, Daily Mirror, Daily Star, Haute Living, Ocean Drive, LA Weekly and more.
She is not planning to pick one thing.
Press contact: VUGA Media Group — Markus Krause — brand.office@vugamediagroup.com