Rosaliina Paavilainen (b. 1993, Tampere, Finland) is a Helsinki-based film director and media artist working across fiction, documentary, and video art. Her films examine how people come to see themselves through others, and how memory, shame, and gendered expectations shape that view. She often puts herself in her own films: in conversation with her mother, directing the amateur theatre group she is filming, or undergoing cosmetic procedures on camera. In several of her films, people are heard rather than shown, while the camera stays on rooms, objects, or the surface of the body.
Her latest short fiction film, Saattaja (Companion, 2026), about an elderly woman and the stranger who appears in her house, was presented at Art Realm '26 – Together, a contemporary art biennial organised by Tampere Art Museum. The experimental short A Beauty Odyssey (2024), about the value placed on youth and beauty in social media culture, premiered at Tampere Film Festival, had its international premiere in the New Nordic Voice competition at Nordisk Panorama, and has since screened at festivals including Helsinki International Film Festival – Love & Anarchy, Zagreb Film Festival, Nordic Film Days Lübeck, and Filmfest Dresden. It is distributed by AV-arkki. Her earlier documentaries have screened at Doclisboa and DocPoint – Helsinki Documentary Film Festival, and If you do this, I will call you by your first name instead of Mom (2019) is held in the collection of Photo Elysée, Lausanne.
Her solo exhibition The Anatomy of Desire was shown at Galleria Huuto, Helsinki, and Galleria Rajatila, Tampere, in 2023. Group exhibitions include To Err Is Human at Mänttä Art Festival (2021), reGeneration4 at Photo Elysée (then Musée de l'Elysée), Lausanne (2020), and Young Artists 2019 at Kunsthalle Helsinki. In 2023, she took part in Resonance, an international mentoring programme by The Wapping Project, held at the Kone Foundation's Saari Residence.
Paavilainen holds an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, where she has taught since 2022, most recently as course leader in moving image, and was an exchange student at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. She is the founder and editor of Avajaishaukka (2022–), an independent weekly guide to exhibition openings, mainly in Helsinki, followed by more than 11,000 people on Instagram.
Her work has been supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, AVEK, and the Olga and Vilho Linnamo Foundation, among others, and she holds a three-year artist grant from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland for 2026–2028. She is currently working on Granny and Me, Pretty Women, an experimental media work built from watching Pretty Woman with her grandmother, for whom each viewing is the first. She is also writing her first feature fiction film, Moira.