Nadia Liz Estela is an interdisciplinary artist, working across painting, performance, and installation. She received her MFA from Montclair State University in 2018. Prior to that, she attended Rutgers University-Newark and Parsons at The New School for her undergraduate studies.

My current work is arriving at an alternative place of belonging that is constructed through fragments of memory. My mixed-media paintings, installations, and performances, often incorporate textile, sculptural elements, and cartography, relating experiences of migration, identity, the Caribbean, and the diaspora. Creating a visual language that lies somewhere between abstraction and magical realism, I utilize the histories of desire and labor within found materials and textiles to construct tableaus where these contradictions visually exist on the same plane. I utilize the tonality in color and materiality to interrogate the norms, morals, and indoctrinated labels of society that we know to exist but do not acknowledge. Similarly through the language of interconnectedness, that all things are connected through our actions, feelings, and thoughts, and what Edouard Glissant references as imagination, that we are nature, I ask questions about liminality within a place, memory, forms of mapping, and socio-political histories. I ask about the journeys that we have made both collectively and individually; how we navigate our social and cultural capital; how have we arrived here; what are the implications of our biases; how we profit from those imbalances; and how all these strata make a whole or keep separate.