BIO: Nadia Coën is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City, born and raised in Zimbabwe, with generational ties to Egypt. Her experiential, time-based practice explores the intersection of architecture, poetics, light, and ephemera. 

Under the umbrella The Inclining Experiment, Coën has produced a wide body of work including architectonic light installations, time-based textual projections, works on paper, artist books, and artifact assemblages.

She is a two-time MacDowell Colony resident and has exhibited at The Drawing Center, White Columns, Exit Art, the Guggenheim Lab, and the Whitney Museum. Recent residencies include Arteventura in Andalusia, Spain (2023–24) and the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy (2025).

Pioneering the 1980s East Village art movement, Coën co-founded two seminal artist-book collectives: Your House Is Mine and Anti-Utopia. Your House Is Mine was a curated protest project with over 50 artists addressing homelessness, gentrification, and the AIDS epidemic, and is now held in collections including MoMA, The Whitney, Getty, Centre Pompidou, Library of Congress, and the MFA Boston.

Coën has a secondary practice in creating Narrative Spaces/ Exhibition Design and has co-created museum exhibitions such as at the Civil Rights Museum, MoCADA, the Alice Austen House Museum. She is currently developing two legacy museums in Kingston, Jamaica.

Submitted Work

1. THE END IS THE BEGINNING – Still from site-soecific time-based projection on ancient ruins, Anadlusia, Spain, 2024

2. PURE MIND – Still sequences from site-soecific time-based projectio on ancient ruins, Anadlusia, Spain, 2024

3. TEXTUAL POETIKS – Time-based text/poetic sequences, 2023 (Can edit down, if need be, and can also provide in horizontal ratio)