BIOGRAPHY

Nadia Reed was born in New York, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. Early on, she showed remarkable talent and, as a teenager, was selected to be in a group show at the Oakland Museum of Art. The prestigious San Francisco Art festival quickly picked her up, and showed her work for two years. At the age of sixteen she was accepted into the Academy of Art in San Francisco, where she studied anatomy and figure drawing, as well as traditional classes in etching, lithography, painting and drawing.

Currently she resides and works in Southern California.

Nadia is of mixed heritage: Native American (Chinook/Quinault) and European descent. Her artistic influences are a mix of Abstract Expressionism, and traditional Pacific Northwestern Native American Art.

During college, Reed studied art, music and film. In 1978, she was accepted into the Berklee School of Music in Boston, where she studied Jazz piano, Sound Engineering and Big Band composition for four years. After a post-collegiate trip abroad, Reed decided to move to Los Angeles and return to a full-time career as a visual artist. Throughout the last nine years, Reed has worked in Los Angeles as a freelance and graphic artist. Largely self taught, she apprenticed and worked as an artist's assistant/apprentice with Hiro Yamagata, among others. She studied Pictorial Oil Painting (realism) with Paul Bedard, in order to achieve a high level of rendering and a tighter dimension to her work.

After mastering photo-realism and highly representational work, Reed's most recent body of work is much looser, and explores her ancestral roots. Always interested in the demystification of native American cultural heritage, she is using a highly developed combination of abstraction and traditional art. Her most recent work explores issues of land & heritage. The subject matter deals with water, tribal dances and motion.

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