Artist Profiles - Nazia - Community Creative Project Manager

Creative Practice

Nazia is a Community Creative Project Manager based in Newport, South Wales. Through NazCreates Studios, Nazia leads community-rooted creative experiences that centre storytelling, identity, and collective expression. Her work spans printmaking, clay, creative writing, and participatory art. For her, creativity is not just about producing work, but about designing spaces where people feel seen and can connect with their own creativity. She often collaborates with communities, organisations, and festivals, curating workshops and projects that carry emotional and cultural depth.

Style and Approach

Nazia’s practice is layered, intentional, and guided by emotion and meaning. She works slowly and thoughtfully, often combining textural elements with personal narrative. Whether through drawing, painting, mixed media printing, or clay, she explores where visual expression meets lived experience.

Journey into Creativity

Her creative journey began with quiet curiosity, sketchbooks, storytelling, and deep journaling. In her teens, this took the form of observations, annotated drawings, and reflections. Over the years, she gravitated towards forms that invite reflection and hands-on process, including block printing, ceramics, creative writing, and textiles. She especially enjoys facilitating workshops where these forms hold a deeper purpose in identity exploration, wellbeing, and intergenerational dialogue. Each project helps her reconnect with her own creative rhythm and sense of meaning.

Inspiration

Nazia draws inspiration from everyday experiences, spiritual reflection, the resilience of women, and the textures of community life. She is moved by overlooked beauty, fragments of memory, untold heritage, and stories that don’t often get told. Her project A Taste of Maindee reminded her how much inspiration lives in neighbourhoods, in gardens, kitchen tables, accents, rituals, and recipes. That project also opened her eyes to creative journalism and storytelling as artistic forms.

Notable Project

A Taste of Maindee remains one of Nazia’s most meaningful projects. It taught her how to listen deeply, hold space for multiple narratives, and shape a cohesive story while honouring individual voices. By bringing people together through food, culture, and place, the project produced a book that became more than a collection of recipes. It was a celebration of belonging, art, poetry, and photography, and it laid the foundation for how she now uses creative storytelling in her workshops.

Current and Future Work

Nazia is currently developing Root & Rise, a focused phase of creative growth supported by mentoring and skill-building in ceramics and print. She is also co-designing a community zine project with local women and pursuing her long-term vision of integrating art and wellbeing through reflective creative spaces. Looking ahead, she plans to pursue an MA in Arts, Health and Wellbeing, anchoring her work in both personal practice and collective healing.

Roots Project

Nazia was inspired to begin Roots after noticing a gap in the local creative landscape, a lack of inclusive, nourishing spaces for young girls and women to explore identity, faith, culture, creativity, and community without pressure or pretense. Roots became a bridge between community and the arts. For Nazia, it has kept her grounded in service and purpose, while showing her that leadership does not have to be loud. It can be soft, consistent, and deeply transformative.

Message Through Her Work

If there is one message Nazia wants people to take away from her work, it is that you matter. Your voice, your roots, and your way of creating are valid. She hopes people feel more whole after engaging with her practice, as if something inside them has been seen, named, or gently held.

Advice to Emerging Creatives

Her advice is simple: allow yourself to experiment without seeking validation. Value the process as much as the outcome. Don’t be afraid of being a beginner, stay curious and honest with your creativity. Create from your truth, let that guide your practice, and trust that your rhythm is enough.