Nina Kogan (also known by the patronymic Osipovna) was a Russian and Soviet artist and textile designer, born in Moscow in 1889. She studied at the Drawing School of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts from 1905 to 1908, with Alfred Eberling and Arkady Rylov, and then studied with Jan Ciągliński. From 1911 to 1913, she attended the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture as a non-degree student; she did not complete the course.
From 1913 to 1919, Kogan taught drawing at a gymnasium in St. Petersburg. In 1918, Vera Ermolaeva brought her into the Museum of the City’s “Art in the Life of the City” department in Petrograd. Kogan helped Ermolaeva and N. I. Lyubavina assemble a collection of painted shop signs. In March 1919, she moved to Vitebsk to teach propaedeutics at the People’s Art School, later the Vitebsk Art and Practical Institute. She was a member of UNOVIS’s creative committee alongside Ermolaeva and Kazimir Malevich.
Kogan staged the Suprematist Ballet, presented once in Vitebsk on February 6, 1920, and wrote “On the Suprematist Ballet” for the first UNOVIS Almanac. After leaving Vitebsk, she no longer worked in Suprematism. In 1922–23, she consulted for Moscow’s Museum of Pictorial Culture, preparing exhibition plans, lecturing, and developing a system for displaying works. She married the artist Anatoly Borisov in 1922.
From 1926 until her death, Kogan lived and worked in Leningrad. She worked on exhibitions at the Vyborg House of Culture and the Museum of the Revolution, and helped prepare an exhibition of new artistic movements at the Russian Museum. From 1928, she worked with Vladimir Lebedev at Detgiz and illustrated children’s books, mainly about animals. Her later work included drawings and watercolors, among them portraits of Anna Akhmatova and Vera Ermolaeva. She joined the graphics section of the Leningrad branch of the Union of Soviet Artists in 1932 and taught at a children’s art studio in the Narva district in the second half of the 1930s. Kogan died in Leningrad in early 1942 from blood poisoning following frostbite in her hand.