About
Nico Stellar is a trans nonbinary artist based in New Mexico. Their work investigates how surveillance and silence shape memory and belonging.
My work began as an inquiry into how surveillance settles beneath the surface—through language, imposed roles, and the quiet dismantling of a person’s right to memory.
I was born in the USSR, with Komi and Tatar roots, and spent part of my childhood crossing Siberia on the Trans-Siberian railway. Some of those years were spent standing in breadlines during the regime fall; others were marked by the cultural richness that endured all around—folk traditions, classical music, libraries, and murals on public walls.
Survival alongside beauty—what better place to start? It’s the path that carried me into law, architecture, teaching, and the arts I create today.
Dysphoria free, August 2023
A translation trip, Cairo, August 2000
In the post-Soviet years, I studied international law at a naval academy in Moscow and interpreted for Russian businesses abroad—my first professional attempt at reading the institutional patterns that operate beneath surface roles.
Some have suggested I was shaped—if not indoctrinated—by the accident of being born in a particular place at a particular time. I say I was born to be free.
I then immigrated to Europe to complete a degree in architecture—a choice that surprised me at the time, but in retrospect was part of the same search for justice in systems of control, and for how spaces shape memory, and memory in turn shapes space.
Since 2011, I’ve lived in Santa Fe—teaching yoga, painting murals, and taking in the beautiful South West.
Galaxy themed murals for Santa Fe Community Yoga Center— 826 Cam De Monte Rey Suite A5, Santa Fe, 2016 - 2024
I taught independently across several community spaces, offering both classes and original artwork that reflected the spirit of each space, including Body and Santa Fe Community Yoga Center—the latter of which graciously accepted my donation of large-scale murals. My work there aimed to create an atmosphere of joy and healing.
Co-teaching a vinyasa yoga workshop, Santa Fe, NM, 2016
My beautiful wife, Natalie and I on our wedding day, 2024
Golden murals , Santa Fe Community Yoga Center—Richards Ln., 2024
As a trans nonbinary artist, I express my resistance through fiction, language, and hand-drawn forms. My linguistic and artistic practice is rooted in Siberian, Komi, and Tatar traditions and is now expanding toward data science, where I’m developing methods for preserving regional dialects, uncovering structural harm, and cultivating situated insight and long-term repair.
After many years of travel, I followed Paul Klee’s idea of taking a line for a walk—until I found myself following where it led. Somewhere along the way, I found myself in a queer family, loved and home at last.
