Artist Bio

Nora Reza has been a devoted and active painter for five decades. At Stanford in the 1970s she was fortunate to have as teachers two giants of painting from the Bay Area Movement, Frank Lobdell and Nathan Oliveira, with whom she remained in lifelong communication.  This informed her entire painting career with a focus on painterly painting where paint is laid on, scraped away, and layered, and objects and patterns create a rhythmic vibration. The influence of her teachers' ideas of what it means to be an artist as well as the influence of French Modernism are apparent while the range and richness of the work is in a sense a self portrait.   

During those years at Stanford she also met a Japanese Zen master, Kobun Chino, who profoundly influenced her and her desire to create a nondual world in painting where form is emptiness and emptiness is form. She spent time on retreats in India, France and the States, and she brings to her work this personal inquiry.   Her Persian heritage and international perspective have been influential in her work as well.

In the years after Stanford she became a mother, earned an MFA, won two Ragdale residencies, a Montalvo Arts award and an Edelstein-Keller Fellowship.   She also published stories drawing from her Persian American heritage which were included in anthologies of work on cross cultural identities.   In the mid-1990s she relocated to France, working from Paris and a 300-year old studio she renovated in Provence.   There she received visitors and collectors from all over the world.  She spent more than two decades painting and exhibiting in France, with one-woman shows at the American School of Paris, Musee de Cruis, and several public Centers for Contemporary Art.  Her work is in numerous international collections.  She now paints out of her live/work loft in Oakland, California.