About the artist

Born and raised in the South of France, Nadia Belalia is an autodidact whose artistic path began long before entering a studio. After moving to New York City in 1989, she was drawn to the city’s metal, grit, and industrial materials. Their rawness sparked her desire to shape and transform matter by hand.

In 1992 she studied welding at Pratt Institute, where sculptor and blacksmith Victor Schmidt became her mentor. His guidance gave her the technical and artistic foundations that ground her practice.

For more than three decades, Nadia Belalia has developed her own sculptural language through designing, tooling, and fabricating forms. Working with industrial materials, found objects, and unconventional media, she transforms them into new material environments—exploring pattern, repetition, and rhythm—where the urban becomes organic and the industrial yields to nature.

Her sculptures stand in direct opposition to the ideology of transhumanism, reclaiming material, gesture, and intense physical labor as profoundly human.

« In between the Art and Function »,
I admire objects of an extreme simplicity,
objects of everyday life which aspire to a certain kind of elegance,
the reincarnation of those into new forms. The creations with organic matter are both magical and profound inspiration.

The darkness of the light and the shading of the bright. » 

Nadia

Her work

Her lighting creates a warm and unique atmosphere by emphasizing shadow as much as light, and have attracted the eye of several NYC restaurants and decorators over the years. It has been a noted feature of various venues and exhibitions.

Featured in
Interior Design Magazine (1996),
Design Sponge (2008),
New York Magazine (2002),
Village Voice (2009),
Inhabitat (2010,2011,2013),
Enlightenment Magazine (2015),
Sky TV Italia (2017)

In 2005, Nadia was commissioned by Sony to design an original piece, a Menorah, which is displayed in Sony’s main atrium during the holidays. In 2006 she was commissioned by Les 7 Doigts de la Main, a circus company based in Montreal, to design a series of thirty lamps for their production offices.

Her work has been shown at Felissimo, a gallery and design house in midtown Manhattan (2001) at Poltrona Frau in Soho (2005) among other places. More recently, she has been invited and shown at the special design week show in Beirut Lebanon (2017).