Featured Artist: Nadia Janjua

"Mode" by Nadia Janjua

Nadia Janjua is a practicing Architect and professional Artist based in the Washington, D.C. area, working under the business name NJARTitecture. Born to Kashmiri-Pakistani parents, Nadia grew up in the forested mountains of Western Maryland with her three siblings, strongly influenced by the solitude and beauty of her natural surroundings. She started drawing before she could write, and she started painting with oils in adolescence. Over the past fifteen years, she has explored different paint mediums, photography, graphic design, ceramics, and printmaking, eventually spending the majority of her time on nurturing her painting ability.

Nadia is inspired by the challenge of capturing potential, nuance, and nostalgia in all of her works. Through her paintings and her architecture, she explores narratives of her past, present, and future in the hopes of not only processing her own life journey, but striking the viewer to reflect more deeply on their own personal narratives.

Moving Shores by Nadia Janjua

Her architectural design focuses on the multi-sensory experience of space, encouraging the inhabitant to go beyond just the visual sense and become an active participant in creating the experience with all of their senses. Similarly, Nadia’s paintings involve a history of layers where line, shape, color, and texture come together to provide an elevated experience of harmony and meaning to the viewer. Her work has evolved from producing rendered images of landscapes and scenes from the East, to abstract painting, incorporating both Western and Eastern parts of her identity.

Nadia has been exhibiting her work professionally since 2002 throughout the United States, and more recently, internationally. She has numerous works commissioned by private collectors, and has contributed annually to charity, fund-raising and auction events for different causes.

"I Found my Soul in a Parking Lot" by Nadia Janjua

In 2010, she was invited to attend the first ever Marketplace of Creative Arts in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, sponsored by the World Islamic Economic Forum, and selected to moderate a panel of artists discussing “Identity in the 21st Century: Investing in the Future of Creative Arts.” In 2011, Nadia was selected as the Coordinator of Muslim Women in the Arts, an international network of approximately 500 creative individuals, and curated their debut art exhibit “Healing & Empowerment: Violence, Women & Art” in Silver Spring, MD, in April 2011. She is currently in the process of starting her own non-profit organization called Muslim Women’s Creative Empowerment, a collective of creative individuals raising awareness of women’s issues through empowering artistic expression.

View all of Nadia’s work for the We the People Project 2011.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, we will be featuring a new We the People Project 2011 exhibiting artist.