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The proposed panel offers a focused look at a number of women artist active in Eastern Europe since the immediate aftermath of WWII and through the period of the Communist rule in the region. Individual case studies thematize the artists’ intersectional identities: as women, as migrants, as Holocaust survivors, as Communist subjects, as artmakers and exhibition-makers, as cohabitants and lovers. Positioning the women’s biographies and their formative life experiences as central to the understanding of the collective identity of a certain generation, the papers discuss the relationship between personal and collective memory; issues of self-historicization, self-expression, and self-effacement; effects of migrations, displacement, and changing citizenships; and the dynamics of desire among heteronormative standards. Countering the tendency to present women artists as overlooked figures in (art) history, this panel consider their lives and work as symptomatic for artistic subjectivities formed under Communism.