Nasta Rojc was born into an affluent family. Her father, Milan Rojc, a lawyer and politician, was reluctant to support his daughter’s choice of a career in the arts. She nevertheless succeeded in convincing him and began taking painting lessons in Zagreb from Oton Iveković (1869–1939), followed by classes at women’s art schools in Vienna (Kunstschule für Frauen und Mädchen) and Munich (Frauen Akademie). In 1909, she married a friend, the painter Branko Šenoa (1879–1939), but the marriage was one of convenience. The pair never divorced, although she lived with her female partner Alexandrine Onslow, a British army officer, from the 1920s until A. Onslow’s death in 1950.

Financial independence was important to the artist, who often touched on the topic in her letters and her autobiographical writings, Sjene, svijetlo, mrak [Shadows, light, dark], which later inspired a graphic novel, Ja, borac [I, a fighter, 2018] by Ana Mušćet and Leonida Kovač. Landscapes and portraits were therefore especially important, as they were the most saleable kind of art. With her avid interest in psychology, the artist perfected her portrayals of sitters’ sentimental states and inner lives, but also created a compelling series of nudes addressing the notion of emotional excess. N. Rojc tackled other genres as well, including urban scenes, seascapes, allegories, and still lifes, but her work was in general only subtly influenced by modern currents in art, albeit demonstrating a very personal understanding of it. Her works with the most contemporary feel were self-portraits in which she addressed the layers of her unconventional identity, such as Autoportret s kistom [Self-portrait with a brush, 1910], Autoportret u lovačkom odjelu [Self-portrait in a hunting outfit, 1912], and Simbolistički autoportret [Symbolist self-portrait, 1914]. In all of them, the artist confronted gender conventions of the period by playing with aspects of her identity which would not have been commonly considered suitable for women, until her face became that of a man with a piercing and confident gaze in Simbolistički autoportret.

N. Rojc’s work was well known during her lifetime, and she exhibited extensively prior to WWII. She also co-founded Zagreb’s Klub likovnih umjetnica, a club for women artists, in 1927, the first of its kind in the country. The club organised many exhibitions of works by female artists until its activities were halted by the outbreak of war. In 1943, N. Rojc was imprisoned under suspicion of colluding with the partisans but was eventually released due to a lack of evidence. After the war, she lived in poverty and her art fell into obscurity. She was rediscovered in the 1990s by scholars who have promoted feminist and gender-oriented readings of her oeuvre which have emphasised her status as a pioneering modernist. This renewed interest in the artist has resulted in two retrospective exhibitions of her work at the Art Pavilion in Zagreb (in 1996/1997 and 2014, respectively), as well as new research on her work and the discovery of additional paintings in private collections.