Nadia Kissel/ Autumn Issue

Nadia’s artistic journey began in Russia, where she trained from the age of fourteen at the Ryazan College of Art and later at the Leningrad Academy. Grounded in the classical traditions of drawing and composition, her practice has since evolved across cultures and continents. A move to Kenya marked a transformative chapter, immersing her in the vibrant textures of African life and expanding her visual language through bold colour and dynamic contrasts. Later, in the United Kingdom, Kissel’s work became increasingly concept-driven, exploring themes of identity, belonging, and displacement through series such as Stripped, Bags and Boxed, and Post Card From….Kissel completed her MFA with distinction at Birmingham City University in 2016, receiving first prize for Stripped, later exhibited at the 2019 Venice Biennale (Personal Structures: Identities, European Cultural Centre). Working through a series-based, conceptually rigorous approach to painting, Kissel continues to explore memory, material, and shifting notions of identity. Her work is held in private and public collections internationally. For Kissel, art remains an evolving conversation between past and present, self and place, a way of mapping experience through the language of form and idea.