Dascha Esselius, born 1953 in Prague in former Czechoslovakia, dead January 3, 2023 was a Czech-Swedish artist with the artist signature Dascha. Dascha Esselius made her debut in 1974 as a painter, drawer and printmaker. She was educated as a sculptor at the University College of Arts Crafts and Design in Stockholm 1978-1983. In the early eighties, she began to work with large installations using light, sound, and motion and with film and video. Her first 16 mm film was Play with Fire based on the audiovisual installation It will never end. The film was produced by Swedish television for the program Blind Date.

Dascha works with video, photography, sound, installations, painting, sculpture and public art. In her artistic practice, she explores aspects of the documentary mode; the tension between the fantastic and the realistic. She is interested in social contexts but also in the inner landscape of the imagination and especially in the interaction between these two worlds. This parallel experience was also the starting point of her work during the polar expedition Beringia in 2005, which resulted in the videos The Lace, The Brainstorm and Fruits de Mer. Dascha also works with artistic projects related to science and health. In her latest project Visiting the Empire of Forgetfulness, she examined the possibility of using portrait photography to increase the self-assurance and awareness of demented elderly people living in institutions.