Each year, a jury selects three exceptional female visual artists from the DIPLOMA festival, offering them financial support, studio space for a year, and a solo exhibition at Mobius Gallery.

Born in 2000, Iulia Hlihor lives and works in Cluj-Napoca. She is a graduate of the University of Art and Design in Cluj, having majored in painting.

Her work explores the shifts between presence and absence, closeness and distance, attachment and separation, encapsulating those themes, through oil painting, into scenes where human narratives play out. What she often likes to depict in her paintings are moments where the mind intervenes to mediate, buffer and to manage the rawness of existence. Characters populate the paintings more with their partial absence than their full presence, almost engulfed by the quietude of the space. The result of which is a stance that shapes the position from which one looks at and understands the world. A filtered and dissected reality, a world that one can observe, analyse, and speculate about rather than inhabit.

Iulia Mirică (b. 2000, Bucharest) is a visual artist based in Bucharest. She holds both a BA and an MA in Graphic Arts from the National University of Arts in Bucharest.

In her work, she investigates the distortion through which we reinterpret the past in order to make it bearable, coherent, or acceptable. The initial experience does not remain intact, it is continuously modified, and this transformation becomes the subject of her practice. She works with dip pen and ink on paper, in a medium that allows accumulation but not correction. Her works propose a space for slowing down and reexamining personal certainties.

Her works have been included in group exhibitions such as Unsaved Stories (Galeria Laborna), Contemporary Drawing in Romania (Scemtovici & Benowitz Gallery), and Timpul (ab)sorbit (Elite Art Gallery). Since 2025, she has also been a member of the Uniunea Artiștilor Plastici din România.

Olivia Ioan is a visual artist working in painting and mixed media practices. She graduated from the Nicolae Tonitza Fine Arts High School and from the National University of Arts in Bucharest, where she completed both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Painting.

Her artistic practice explores domestic space as an active structure, in which the relationships between figure, object, and interior generate expressive variations and controlled tensions. Through painting and textile collage, she investigates the ways in which domestic architecture functions as a mediating space between the interior and the world beyond it. She is interested in the domestic space as refuge, as well as in how it is redefined through human presence or absence.