Nadia Younes is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, sculpture, installation,
video, and writing. Born in Nazareth to a Palestinian refugee father and a Soviet
immigrant mother, she moved between Israel, Mali, Mauritania, Jordan, and Russia.
This transitory upbringing shaped her sensitivity to displacement and instability.
Overlooked spatial systems are central to her practice and reflect these concerns.
Her work explores tensions between surface and structure, access and refusal,
containment and collapse. Drawing from industrial materials and urban demolition sites,
she merges classical painting methods with cast resin, paint skins, flexible metal
conduit, and construction remnants. She treats these materials as bearing memory of
bodies in transformation. The work reflects systems of labor, gender, and survival.
Younes is multilingual in English, Arabic, Hebrew, and Russian. She approaches
materials as she does language: as codes that can be bent, fractured, and
Reassembled.
Her recent presentations include PowerLine at Perrotin, New York (2025) and a public
video screening with ZAZ10TS in Times Square (2024). She also held the solo
exhibition Elusive Territories at The Study at Yale (2024) and has a forthcoming solo
exhibition at the Ely Center for Contemporary Art (Summer 2026). Select works include
Interference Pattern, a mirrored environment with a suspended car and circulating
liquids; Site of Failure, a kinetic installation composed of acrylic paint skins;
Compression Field, a 450-pound resin sculpture embedded with demolition debris; and
Second Lesson in Boundaries, a trompe-l’oeil oil painting reflecting surveillance and
fencing systems in Israel and Palestine.
She holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art and a BFA
from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Her training includes
scientific glassblowing, lithography, and marble carving. Younes has co-taught and
mentored at the Yale School of Art and Bezalel, as well as through community-based
initiatives. She received support from residencies including the Vermont Studio Center,
Monson Arts, Evergreen Center for the Arts, the John David Mooney Foundation, and
ISPMFA. She received the Wingate Charitable Foundation Fellowship and the Winsor &
Newton Award for Excellence in Painting.