The Collection

Nizhonniya Austin is a Diné and Tlingit multidisciplinary artist working across painting, performance, music, and acting. Born in 1990 in Juneau, Alaska, and raised between Juneau and Albuquerque, she studied painting at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, earning her degree in 2020.

Austin's large-scale abstract paintings, worked in acrylic, oil, and wax pencil, emerge from a physical, almost ritualistic process — she describes her body as a vessel through which the paintings move, resulting in dense, circumlinear compositions where anthropomorphic and ancestral forms surface and dissolve. Her visual language draws on Tlingit formline design and the intricacy of woven surfaces alongside a wide range of influences outside art history, from Abstract Expressionism to fashion, alternative music, and pop culture. She has described her paintings as prayers and conversations with her ancestors, made through a process closer to intuition than planning.

Austin is also known for her work as an actor, most notably in a starring role in Showtime's The Curse (2023) alongside Emma Stone, and she completed a starring role in the upcoming film Seventeen, directed by Justin Ducharme. Her debut solo exhibition, The Year of the Vampire, opened at Tara Downs, New York, in 2025. Her work has also been included in the traveling group exhibition Exploding Native Inevitable, presented at Bates College Museum of Art (2023), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (2024), Sheldon Museum of Art (2025), and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art (2025), among other venues.