Elena Chaikin
Writer, artist, graphic designer, marketer, and builder of monsters, impossible romances, old curses, complicated families, and women who refuse to become anyone’s prophecy.
Elena Chaikin is a Chicagoland-based author and artist who has been writing stories and creating artwork for as long as she can remember. Born in Kemerovo, Russia, and brought to the United States when she was three, she grew up in Chicago between Russian and American cultures—a duality that continues to shape her interest in myth, identity, family history, belonging, and fate versus choice.
Elena earned a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago, where she studied horror writing under acclaimed author Mort Castle. She later earned a master’s degree in Public Relations and Advertising and an MBA in Marketing from DePaul University.
Her storytelling is shaped by Slavic folklore, vampire mythology, supernatural history, magical realism, and writers including Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, and Anton Chekhov.
Writing has never been Elena’s only way of telling stories.
She began with traditional art before moving into digital illustration, Photoshop, photo manipulation, compositing, character design, and graphic design. Over the years, she has created everything from drawings and digital paintings to story covers, character concepts, fan art, promotional pieces, and elaborate Photoshop experiments.
Long before Devils in the Windy City, she was already using visual art to figure out who her characters were, what they wore, where they lived, and what their worlds felt like. Sometimes the image came after the story. Sometimes the image helped her discover the story in the first place.
That same process now shapes the visual world surrounding Devils in the Windy City. Much of the project’s character artwork, posters, promotional design, and visual worldbuilding grows out of Elena’s longtime fascination with making fictional people and places feel tangible.
For her, storytelling has always been both written and visual—a way of building character, mood, mythology, and emotion through words, images, and atmosphere.
Her work tends to live where the ordinary world starts to feel haunted: old stories, hidden magic, strange inheritances, family ghosts, and monsters who are most interesting when they have grief, rules, loyalties, and terrible coping mechanisms.
