I am Nettie Zan, a lifetime artist living and working in the great watershed state of Missouri.

I am also a parent, communitarian, teacher, downwardly mobile, philosopher, tarot reader, trans-non-binary gendered, scientist explorer, naturalist, river rat and holy fool. These varied labels and intersections of identity all come together through my dedication to art, healing and community.

I host gatherings and meditations, reaching out primarily to those who are under-served, recovering, and new to the ideas of self-agency and personal growth. I create ritual art and curated experiences of the deep wild. I write and perform my poetry in numerous venues around Kansas City and Missouri. I host “Recreational Meditation;” a 5 week session at the local library featuring interactive, creative mindfulness. I am grateful to have been awarded an ongoing studio residency with InterUrban ArtHouse, offering a strong and consistent foundation for my work in the arts.

My current career is in teaching: meditation, yoga, English as a Second Language, and non-traditional spiritual practices. While I am often called Teacher, I believe that the world is our real teacher: we are all students sharing our experience of her grandeur together.

Childhood offered me experiences of religious extremism, neglect and poverty. Traumatizing events are all too common in our modern culture and my own provide a basis in my life for empathy, healing and optimism about our collective power to change. The blessing in being mostly unsupervised as a child is that I developed a deep connection to wilderness and never inherited the fear of the outdoors that is commonplace today. I also grew a strong sense of self and self-reliance.

While raising my own child, I spent my twenties exploring and inventing myself as an artist. Poetry, performance poetry and painting became standard practices in my life. During these years of extensive self-guidance and with the benefit of community mentors, I established a strong foundation in writing and visual arts. I also won the “Best Mathematician” of my graduating class in college and won a curators award at Fermi Lab Gallery for one of my paintings.

I’ve worked with Kansas City poets to generate collaborative spaces and events. I’ve hosted open mics and workshops, co-founded a poetry festival, co-edited and published an award-winning local poetry series. I showed an installation piece featuring artbooks at the Leedy-Volkous Gallery. I was blessed that one of the artbooks is housed in the local artists collection at Nelson-Atkin’s Museum. I’ve toured nationwide with wonderful poets and been forever changed by the grace and generosity of artists across the country.

I was the executive director of the venue, Uptown Arts Bar (2012-2018), where we hosted between 50-75 live, original performance art events a month. According to my personal values, there was no curation of the events: anyone who wanted to produce a show was given space, time and support to do so. This generated a fiercely diverse community and a space for intersectionality in action. It was a tremendous part of my life, honing my own performance, leadership and skills to a dazzling sharpness … and teaching me vital lessons about burnout, over-reach and the weight of individual actions.

During my country-living years (2017-21), I lived out of my truck visiting wilderness areas and intentional communities. With the privilege of being able to focus on art full time, I was able to develop my voice and philosophy. I wrote several novels, painted increasingly sophisticated artbooks, and created a multi-modal collection for a one-person gallery show called “Things I Killed for you Today.”

I floated hundreds of miles of Missouri rivers in my kayak. I spent one winter living at the base of a volcano in Iceland. I spent the first two years of the pandemic in a remote commune. I watched meteor showers from the Chihuahua Mountains and scarcely avoided a landslide at the source of the Rio Grande. I toured dozens of North American petroglyph locations. I studied at the Marina Abramovic Institute in Greece. I rode the flooding Buffalo River for five days. Each of these wild spaces are integral to the body of work that I create.

I do not reflect industrialization in my work, I reflect an ancient connection to our home planet.

“The Western anarchist claims no authority above the self. The Indigenous anarchist claims no authority above Nature.” — Klee Benally