HOMA TAJ NASAB is an artist, filmmaker & museologist. She is the founder of MUSEUMVIEWS (blog and museum consultancy, est. 2003); International Museum Workers Day (IMWD, 2015); and Global Sports Heritage Association (GSHA, 2019).
For three decades, HOMA’s interests in the arts have spanned the worlds of theater, dance, film and visual arts.
Daughter of a painter, Homa began painting in high school in the late 1980’s. Her first brush with performance arts also came during high school, on Long Island NY, when she briefly studied with the legendary American dancer & choreographer Jacques D’Amboise, a principal dancer of the New York City Ballet and the founder of National Dance Institute (1976).
During the early 1990’s, Homa studied at the prestigious Stella Adler Conservatory (1989-1991), and worked as a production assistant on a number of independent film and theatre projects, in New York City & Boston. Later in the decade, she pursued film and video production when she made a number of short films – including Waiting For Van Gogh and an experimental animation film based on Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period masterpiece Seated Nude Back (1902). To date, Homa has made nine experimental short films.
Starting in 2013, Homa returned to her roots as a visual artist, on a full-time basis, making paintings, conceptual and video art with focus on cinema & theatre, as well as her experiences of living through a revolution, a war and mass migration.
Over the past several years, Homa has created a growing body of small scale erotic nude mixed media paintings reminiscent of ancient and Renaissance secret chambers (or Gabinetto Segreto). The theme of bodies and eroticism carries over to the artist’s larger compositions embodied by popular movie legends such as Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot and Elizabeth Taylor, among others.
Coastal Paintings is a series that relates to American film history, as well as the artist’s own experiences of living along coastal cities and regions, particularly in the Hamptons in NY and on the island of Nantucket (since 1997).
Recently, she has begun to incorporate soft sculptures in her installation work. Making textile based soft sculptures is an intensely personal practice that reflects the artist’s childhood in Iran, and later growing up on Long Island, NY.
Homa holds post-graduate degrees in history of collecting and museology (Harvard University); 19th-20th century fine arts and their institutional histories (The Courtauld Institute); and, histories of museums & collecting (University of Oxford). She also wrote her unpublished doctoral dissertation on the comparative history of museums in emerging markets, c 1870′s-1940′s, at the University of Oxford, UK.