Nina Boas (1980 Saumur, France) Lives and works in the Netherlands.
Boas graduated in 2003 from the art academy AKI ArtEZ in Enschede and recently (2016) graduated from the Master of DAStheater(formaly known as DasArts) . She has a visual arts background and developed a practice in performance art and gradually came into the theater circuit, made in 2012, an object theater production for the Feikeshuis. Boas is co-founder / co-director of the performance program PAE(Performance art event) and part of the performance ensemble TRICKSTER.

In her early works between 2007-2012 she had been searching for ways to bring drawings to life and came up with the projection set up where she did live drawing, projected life size where she would interact with the images (as if she was in her own drawings). It created a framework to develop many projects where she blurred different elements, like French pop songs, cabaret dancers, performative lectures or performances where the audience could take part. At first, her early work might seem childlike, but it’s more complex, playing with scale and using naïve drawings, clumsily building installations and singing French pop songs.
Her projects are time- based and are with mix media (performance, live drawing, life-size projection and installations). She also blurs reality's and the imaginary world with personal stories that feel like a daydream. she uses these tools to express a layered narrative where she invite the audience to experience their own stories and, together with her, investigate issues such as the popular conception of the ‘woman’ (her position today), social structures, politics, and dreams.

During her time at DASTheater she learned about the shamanic journeying practise over a period of 10 days in a self-curated program. This brought her to look for ways that art can create a mystical experience and inspired her to experience the world as a place that is alive and interconnected. The practise can be done at home or anywhere, but her interest lies on how to bring this in to the white cube and Black box, because that makes the contrast of experience clearer, and asks how this can be inviting for an audience. she is not talking about appropriating mystical traditions or creating representations of the experiences she had, but of finding ways of giving a journey experience, activating a state of association and visual experience to an audience. Art shares many elements with shamanism and she sees it as a fertile platform to challenge the way we see the world.

She is interested in investigating the performativity of objects, and the abilities materials have on their own and as ‘collaborators’ with performers. She has been working on the idea of the veil, thinking about the different kinds of materials that can be veils for a performer to use or manipulate. In this she finds the fascination of the extended body, the transformation of the human, and movement. Paper Body (her graduation show at DAS) brought together many elements that she wants to further develop, including shamanistic rituals, costumes, sound, light and the body.