Mihail Chemiakin was born in Moscow in 1943 to a Red Army officer and his wife.  After a peripatetic childhood in East Germany he and his family returned to Russia in 1956, settling in Leningrad, where Mihail enrolled at the Special High School for Art. Chemiakin worked on the maintenance crew of the Hermitage Museum and in 1967 he founded the "St. Petersburg" group of artists as well as an artistic movement he called Metaphysical Synthesism, dedicated to the creation of a new form of art based on the study of religious art of all ages and peoples.

In 1971, after ten years of harassment and persecution by the KGB for his non-conformist art, interest in forbidden “bourgeois” artists, and “unhealthy” influence on fellow artists and writers, Chemiakin was finally forced out of the USSR by the Soviet authorities. He settled first in Paris with his wife Rebekka and their daughter Dorothée, then moved to New York City in 1981. In 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev opened the Soviet Union to the world, a major retrospective exhibition of Chemiakin’s art was held in Moscow, and for many years the artist complemented his American and European exhibitions, publications, teaching, and theatrical work with projects in Russia, from his studios first in Claverack, NY (1988-2007), then in Villedieu-sur-Indre, France (2007-the present).

Chemiakin's theatrical work dates back to his 1967 production of Shostakovich’s opera The Nose and “happenings” he organized in his Leningrad studio. Since 1994 he has designed and directed processions and shows in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Venice with Slava Polunin and other performance artists. In 2001 Chemiakin staged his version of the ballet The Nutcracker, followed by five more ballets; in 2015 his autobiographical play New York. 1980. Us! premiered in Moscow.  Chemiakin’s sculptures stand in St. Petersburg, Moscow, London, and other cities; of these the best known are his Peter the Great (St. Petersburg), Children - victims of the sins of adults (Moscow), and Peter the Great’s Embassy (London).