Daniela Naomi Molnar is an artist and poet working with the mediums of language, image, and place. She is also a wilderness guide, educator, and eternal student. She works across forms, melding painting, poetry, prose, site-specific intervention, editing, and teaching. She has training in botany and ecology and has worked at the intersection of science and art for many years. Her mediums are pigment, paper, water, varied types of language, and varied forms of community engagement. Place is always one of her mediums. She uses these mediums to try to shape and nurture generative new ideas, ethics, and cultural change. Her writing and art for the past several years has been focused on issues of climate grief and climate justice. In her paintings, the materials that she uses are themselves bearers of meaning. She makes many of her paints from pigments gathered from public lands, combining these pigments with rainwater, riverwater, and oceanwater. Her writing is a confluence of languages: poetry and essay mingle with color and form. A cornerstone of her practice is to be resolutely non-competitive, non-expert, and committed to always changing. Her work was the subject of a front-page feature in the Los Angeles Times, an OPB Art Beat feature, has been shown nationally, is in private collections internationally, and has been recognized by numerous grants, awards, and residencies. Her forthcoming book chorus won the 2021 Omnidawn 1st/2nd book prize (selected by Kazim Ali) and will be published in 2022.
Daniela Naomi Molnar
