Nadia Younes is a Palestinian-Russian interdisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, installation, and video. 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, instability, and overlooked spatial systems, concerns that are central to her practice.
Her work explores the 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 other construction remnants. Her work treats these materials as bearing memory of bodies in transformation, reflecting systems of labor, gender, and survival. Multilingual in English, Arabic, Hebrew, and Russian, Younes 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), a public video commission with ZAZ10TS in Times Square (2024), and the solo exhibition Elusive Territories at The Study at Yale (2024). Select works include Interference Pattern, a mirrored environment featuring 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 that reflects surveillance and fencing systems.
Younes 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. She has taught at the Bezalel Academy and has served as a graduate assistant at the Yale School of Art and has participated in residencies such as the Vermont Studio Center and ISPMFA. She is the recipient of the Winsor & Newton Award for Excellence in Painting.
