Nadira Narine was born in Mississauga, Ontario, in October 1993, though her story really begins in Panama, where she returned as a newborn, carried home to a world alive with colour, pattern, and culture. Her mother’s Panamanian roots and her father’s Trinidadian and Indian heritage filled her childhood with texture and story, which included the scent of spices, dance, and drums.

When her father passed, home became a memory she could feel but not name. At seventeen, she followed his footsteps to Canada, pursuing computer science, but the language of machines could not answer the ache of loss or the hunger for belonging.

Wandering into Sheridan College, Nadira discovered glass. The furnaces, heat, and movement called to something deep within her, and she enrolled. Through glass and textiles, she began to explore memory, identity, and home, an exploration of material and emotion.

Through glass and textiles, Nadira began to weave a visual language of home, an exploration of material and emotion. In 2018, she joined the Artist-in-Residence program at Harbourfront Centre, where she spent five transformative years developing her award-winning Woven Series, work that threads memory, pattern, and belonging into sculptural form.

The Woven Series draws from the textures and colours of Panamanian craft, from woven and clay baskets to the layered textiles known as Molas. Each piece features a black-and-white pattern, created through a chemical reaction of glass colours that Nadira has refined over five years. Bands of coloured glass thread across the patterns, appearing stitched, and recent explorations include beadwork-inspired dots and reverse appliqué techniques that reveal hidden colours beneath. In every vessel, memory, material, and heritage converge.

When her residency at Harbourfront Centre ended in 2023, Nadira began a new chapter at the Living Arts Centre in Mississauga, where she continues to explore and create. Chromatic Echoes emerged during this period, a series of work investigating emotion through colour.

In this new chapter, Nadira experiments with form, colour, and surface, allowing each piece to respond to intuition, memory, and the stories she carries. Every choice, from the sweep of colour to the smallest detail, becomes part of a larger dialogue between her materials and the emotions they evoke.

No matter the work, the process remains: pick colours, set the tone, evoke emotions. It is through this ongoing practice that Nadira continues to explore memory, heritage, and the ever-evolving conversation between material and emotion.

TLDR

Raised in Panama City, Nadira Narine has a deep interest in her cultural roots. Having lived in Canada since 2011, Nadira explores objects and memories from her childhood as a means of self-discovery and connection to home.

Nadira is an Artist-in-Residence at the Living Art Centre in Mississauga, Ontario. She holds a Bachelor of Craft and Design with a specialty in Glass and Textiles, completed a four-year Artist-in-Residence position in glass at Harbourfront Centre, and was most recently recognized as a finalist for the prestigious 2023 and runner up 2025 RBC Glass Award.