Aliza Nisenbaum

Aliza Nisenbaum was born in 1977 in Mexico City, into a Mexican Jewish family, and now lives and works in Queens, New York. She first studied psychology at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City from 1997 to 1999 before turning to art, earning a BFA in 2001 and an MFA in 2005 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Her paintings are built from sustained, often months-long relationships with her subjects: day laborers, domestic workers, subway and airport staff, and participants in community and immigrant-advocacy programs, rendered in saturated color against patterned textiles and interiors. That method of embedded portraiture shaped a fast institutional rise. She received the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant in 2013 and a fellowship with the New York City Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs in 2015, was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and held an artist residency and solo exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2017 to 2018. In 2020 she was the subject of a solo exhibition at Tate Liverpool, developed in part remotely during the pandemic and accompanied by the Tate publication Aliza Nisenbaum: Taking Care. A solo exhibition at the Queens Museum followed in 2023, alongside a 2022 site-specific commission for Delta Air Lines at LaGuardia Airport's Terminal C. She participated in the 2023 Gwangju Biennale and, in 2023 to 2024, painted a series of portraits commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. She received the Creative Capital Award for Modes of Assembly in 2024. Earlier biographical material also lists Mary Mary Gallery in Glasgow as a representing gallery, though her most recent primary-market activity runs through Anton Kern Gallery in New York and Regen Projects in Los Angeles.

Nisenbaum's work has been covered by Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and Vogue, among other outlets, generally in the context of her institutional exhibitions at Tate Liverpool, the Queens Museum, and the Whitney Biennial. The critical throughline across that coverage is her insistence on dignified, collaborative portraiture of subjects, immigrant workers, caregivers, and neighbors, who are rarely the focus of large-scale figurative painting, and on the studio time and relationship-building her process requires. No exact, independently verifiable critic quotation could be sourced for this profile, so none is reproduced here.

Nisenbaum's market runs almost entirely through the primary market rather than the auction room. She is represented by Anton Kern Gallery in New York and, since a first Los Angeles exhibition in 2024, by Regen Projects. Individual works attributed to her have appeared at auction, including Ximena and Randy at Christie's and El Abanico as Lot 6 in the Queens Museum 2025 Gala Auction hosted by Sotheby's, but no confirmed hammer price, currency, or sale date for either lot could be verified as of this writing, so no auction record is published here.

Nisenbaum's career to date has been built on museum and institutional recognition rather than on a developed secondary market: there is no catalogue raisonne, and, as of this writing, no confirmed auction sale price exists for her work at all. That combination means collectors should treat her as an artist whose demand signal currently comes from exhibition history, residencies, and gallery representation rather than from price data, and should expect any future auction appearances to be closely watched precedents rather than points on an established curve.