Nizhonniya Austin has been drawn to a creative life for as long as she can remember. From the time she was old enough to hold a pencil, she recalls, “I was just obsessed with paper and crayons and whatever I could make marks with." As a young girl, she created illustrated storybooks, wrote songs, and devised elaborate roles for her Barbie dolls as she dreamed of becoming an actress. In the late ‘90s, she chuckles, “I wanted to be Céline Dion. I’m definitely not Céline Dion, but I am still a singer, and I make music. They say that everyone is born an artist and you just kind of lose it as you get older, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that. Everything I did as a child, I continue to do as an adult.”

As an artist whose practice spans several disciplines, including painting, acting, poetry, and songwriting, Austin continues to rely on her intuition. To illustrate this point, she explains that her bed is a “huge part of my practice. I need to be in bed for like two hours before getting up.” Over the years, art school professors, therapists, and even other artists have encouraged a more intensive approach to the studio, emphasizing the value of early mornings, planning over spontaneity, and a focus on production over process. After years of beating herself up and feeling like she didn’t measure up professionally, Austin finally concluded that “I don’t like to do that. I don’t like to treat myself that way. For me, treating myself well is having time to lie in bed and think about my dreams. And think about my life before I do anything.”

This attunement to different rhythms and frequencies, as well as her fidelity to her own way of doing things, are aspects of Austin’s personality that have served her artmaking well. Her oil, acrylic, and wax pencil paintings, which she creates on the floor while circling the canvas, exude a dynamic, swirling energy. “I’m a very instinctual person, and I don’t like to plan things,” says Austin. “I’m really into what happens in the moment and the raw energy that comes from making things.” She often comes into the studio using whatever emotion she might be feeling as a “sketch,” or guide. Listening to music, she paces and lets the momentum of her body bring forth marks on the canvas. Describing this process as a “kind of performance,” in which she becomes an energetic vessel for what needs to be expressed, Austin lets the music and her emotional response guide the development of each work. Often, she’ll repeat a phrase to herself while working. This phrase becomes integrated into the feeling of the final piece, and sometimes also manifests in the title, providing poetic, comic, or conceptual points of entry for the viewer (titles of recent works from a 2025 exhibition include: Blood! Tears! Electricity! Love! Power! Friendship!, The goth bad boy supreme, and It Never Really Ends It Just Turns Into Something Else).

The finished works are vortices of shapes, color, and twisting lines that occasionally coalesce into familiar forms before dissolving again. Repeated ovoid elements evoke Tlingit formline design, while the elaborate layering and patterning of the canvases recall the intricacy of woven surfaces.  As a Diné and Tlingit artist raised between Juneau and Albuquerque, Austin’s visual vocabulary encompasses ancestral art forms as well as influences of her upbringing as a moody teenager interested in fashion, film, and alternative music. Some of her inspirations include filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, musician Patti Smith, and artists Annie Pootoogook and Tracy Emin.

In 2023, Austin was cast in a starring role in the Showtime series The Curse, created by Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder. In 2025, she had her first solo exhibition, The Year of the Vampire, at Tara Downs Gallery in New York. She recently completed filming a starring role in the upcoming film Seventeen, directed by Justin Ducharme, which features an all-Indigenous cast. Articles about her and her work have appeared in major arts and culture publications. This wave of success is made all the sweeter by Austin’s struggles as a young person who was so painfully self-conscious and shy that she would often eat lunch alone in the bathroom. Navigating a world rife with racism and negative stereotypes about women and people of color, she often felt discouraged about the possibilities for her future: “I just shied away from fantasies of being an actor or a successful artist. I just thought, this isn’t for me; it’s not my time.”

Thankfully, Austin is not given to taking her cues from others. Self-described as stubborn and rebellious, she shares that when someone tries to tell her how “things are supposed to be done, I naturally don’t want to do it that way.” In addition to her other projects, she’s currently writing a screenplay about a teenage girl in Albuquerque who is abducted by aliens, drawing on those formative years of isolation and frustrated dreaming. For her, artmaking is an existential imperative—it’s “not just a hobby. It’s the only title I really want. I am an artist at my foundation. It’s who I was born to be.”

Tune in for a livestream with Nizhonniya Austin on October 21 at 12 p.m. Alaska Standard Time, via Crowdcast. Please see the Anchorage Museum web calendar for more details.