Nicole Wittenberg

Nicole Wittenberg (b. 1979) is an American painter, curator, and writer based in New York City. Born in San Francisco, she earned her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has built a practice centered on painting the natural world with immediacy and emotional clarity. Inspired in part by Impressionism, Wittenberg works directly from observation, translating landscapes, gardens, and outdoor scenes into vivid, gestural compositions. Her brushwork is energetic and tactile, capturing shifting light, color, and atmosphere while reflecting her own psychological state in the moment of painting. Rather than depicting nature as a fixed entity, she approaches it as alive and continuously changing. Wittenberg received the John Koch Award for Best Young Figurative Painter from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012. In addition to her studio practice, she has taught at the New York Studio School and the School of Visual Arts, contributing thoughtfully to contemporary dialogue around painting and representation.

Wittenberg's artworks are featured in numerous esteemed collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY, The Albertina in Vienna, Austria, the Boston Museum of Fine Art in Boston, MA, and the Aishti Foundation in Beirut, Lebanon.