Pussy Riot is a Russian feminist art collective and activist movement founded in Moscow in 2011. Working across performance, music, video, public intervention, and political protest, the collective is known for its brightly coloured balaclavas and unannounced actions staged in public spaces. Pussy Riot gained international recognition in 2012 following Punk Prayer, an anti-Putin performance inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, after which three participating members were sentenced to two years in prison.Drawing on punk culture, Dada, Fluxus, and twentieth-century actionism, Pussy Riot uses humour, provocation, and direct confrontation to address authoritarianism, censorship, gender inequality, LGBTQ+ rights, political imprisonment, and war. Its performances are typically documented through photography and video, allowing brief guerrilla actions to circulate internationally as enduring works of political art.Pussy Riot’s work has been presented at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, which organised the collective’s first major museum exhibition, Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia, in 2023. Today, Pussy Riot operates less as a fixed group than as a decentralised global movement united by the belief that art can function as resistance.