Vija Celmins (b. October 25, 1938, Riga, Latvia) is an American artist.

Vija Celmins immigrated to the United States with her family from Latvia when she was ten years old. She and her family settled in Indiana. Celmins received international attention early in her career for her renditions of natural scenes, often painted from photographs lacking a point of reference, horizon, or discernible depth of field.

She employs different media in her works, including oil paint, charcoal, pencil drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. In 1967, Celmins taught drawing and painting at the University of California at Irvine. Her works often incorporate shades of black, white and gray in place of colors, drawing inspiration from photos that do not seem to have any discernible depth, central point or point of reference. Her early work includes oil paintings of lamps, soups, and heaters on different media.

Celmins' early work includes paintings of such commonplace objects as TVs, lamps, and black and white photographs. These works also share with Gerhard Richter's an apparent randomness and thus apparently dispassionate attitude. It is as if any photograph would do as a source for a painting, and the choice is apparently unimportant. This is of course not the case, but the work contains within it the impression that the image is chosen at random from an endless selection of possible alternative images of similar nature.

Celmins is now internationally known for her later works which are often intensely realistic paintings and drawings. Celmins has also worked with print media since the early 1960s, again meticulously rendering details of the natural environment. Celmins's work demonstrates a remarkably close engagement with the natural world mediated by photography. Celmins has said her images dispel romantic notions of the sublime in nature.

In the late 1960s, Celmins started drawing more, mainly working with graphite pencil. Her subjects became increasingly selective until her work became almost entirely images of the surface of the ocean, night skies (with stars), and the surface of the desert, with small stones and pebbles rendered in great detail.