Nava Messas-Waxman is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator working within visual arts, moving-image, intermedial performance work, and immersive installations. Her work is deeply informed by research into movement practice, diasporic subjectivity, the notion of gestures, archives, and the embodied materialities of memory.

Her early performative drawing and painting work, along with bodily practices and dance, inform and influence the development of her current artistic research. Her interests include embodiment, performativity, liminality, mark-making, and poetic notions of gestures, embedded within artistic, cultural, and personal contexts.

Messas-Waxman earned an MFA in Visual Arts from York University, where she explored the re-materialization of performance archives and initiated performative-based research on the migration of gesture in visual arts and dance. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate in the Visual Arts department at York University. Her doctoral thesis, Diasporic Gestures, examines the significance of embodied methodologies and new media technologies in contemporary archival art practices.

She exhibited her work widely, including at Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, Toronto (2022), Artworx Toronto (2022), and the Varley Art Gallery of Markham (2019). Her projects include Shared-View (2022), Variations on Broken Lines (2020), Open Work (2020-2023), Choreographed Marks (2019), and Elements of Chance (2016). In 2019, she received the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada's Joseph Armand Bombardier Scholarship (SSHRC), along with several grants from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts. She is a graduate research member at the n::D Studio Lab at York University AMPD, working on developing an interdisciplinary methodology for embodied archival worldmaking.