Her first solo exhibition, "Ust-Tsilma," took place in 2010 at the START young art platform of the Vinzavod Center for Contemporary Art (Moscow), followed by exhibitions at Green Art Gallery (Perm) and Rodnya Studio (Moscow). In 2012, she held the exhibition "Inside the Surface" (Triumph Gallery, Moscow), and in 2019, she presented a joint project with Ulyana Podkorytova, "Parato Basco," at the A.A. Borisov Museum of Artistic Development of the Arctic. This project was the result of an artistic exploration during the "Maryin Dom" art residency in the village of Chakola in the Pinezhsky District of the Arkhangelsk Region. By 2020, Yakovleva had held over 20 solo exhibitions in various cities across Russia (Arkhangelsk, Vladivostok, Vyksa, Moscow, Perm, St. Petersburg) and abroad (Basel, Bern, Berlin).
She has participated in group projects at the Voronezh Center for Contemporary Art (Can’t Take It Anymore, 2009), the M&Yu Gelman Gallery ("Russian Landscape," Moscow, 2011), the Moscow Museum of Modern Art ("Detective," 2014), the Multimedia Art Museum ("Pierre Brochet's Puzzle," Moscow, 2015), the Central Exhibition Hall "Manege" ("Hooray! Sculpture!" St. Petersburg, 2017), the ART4 Museum ("HAHAHAMOSCOW MOSCOWHAHAHA," Moscow, 2017), the Ural branch of the NCCA ("Nothing Is What It Seems," Yekaterinburg, 2018), as well as the Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art (2019), and others. Yakovleva was an artist-in-residence at "Gridchinhall" (2014, 2015), the NCCA residency in Kronstadt (2014), the "Zarya" residency in Vladivostok (2017), Vyksa AiR in Vyksa, PROGR in Bern (Switzerland), and the Garage Museum's Studios and Art Residencies Program (Moscow, 2019–2020).
In 2014, Ustina won the STRABAG Award for young artists in Vienna, and in 2020, she became a laureate of the AES+F Artist Residency Award in New York. Ustina Yakovleva's works are held in private collections in Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands.