Jo Nanajian was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1996 and immigrated to Boston, MA in 2008. She received a BFA in General Fine Arts and a concentration in Book Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2018. Focusing on charcoal as a medium, Nanajian is driven by her intuition and gesture to create large scale abstracted pieces. The goal is to capture her emotions from an unprocessed memory that ultimately resulted in a feeling of loss of control. She explores these emotions by distorting figures using a repeated draw-and-erase technique until it is unrecognizable, a response to the death of her “American Dream”.
Nanajian's work was most recently displayed in “Amani Lewis: Subjective Nature” an exhibition at the August Wilson Cultural Center. She was later invited to the Fountainhead Residency where she just finished her most recent body of work.
Photo: Alex Nunez