Nina Yankowitz has created dynamic works of abstraction, imbued with her formal and social justice concerns, throughout her six-decade career. Whether taking radical approaches to painting or mounting ambitious multimedia installations, she has probed the material, political and sonic nature of abstract art.
Born and raised in New Jersey, N. Yankowitz would skip class in high school to hang around legendary folk music venues in Greenwich Village. N. Yankowitz lived at Group 212, a collective of artists, musicians, and poets with whom she spent the summer of 1968 in Woodstock, New York, near the site of the famed Woodstock Festival. Group 212’s collaborative spirit and mixing of music and art inspired N. Yankowitz to embrace emerging technologies and media. Sound especially came to underpin her practice.

N. Yankowitz studied at Temple University and the New School for Social Research before graduating from the School of Visual Arts. She presented her historic Draped Paintings and Pleated Paintings at Kornblee Gallery, NY in 1971. The Draped Paintings (1967–71) are unstretched canvases sprayed with mists of acrylic paint, producing abstract atmospheric expanses of colour. She hung these works in soft folds that cascaded vertically down or horizontally across the wall. The artist created her Pleated Paintings by running lengths of canvas through pleating machines after spraying them with paint. Her Dilated Grain Readings are synesthetic experiences, using colour as visual sound score notations for viewers to scan the weave of canvas or linen surfaces. Her early work was the subject of a 2022 solo exhibition at Eric Firestone Gallery, accompanied by an illustrated catalogue (Nina Yankowitz Paintings, 1960s–70s, New York: Eric Firestone Gallery).

In 1973, N. Yankowitz was invited to participate in the inaugural Whitney Biennial. It was during this time that N. Yankowitz became a founding member of Heresies – the iconic feminist collective – alongside artists such as Joan Snyder (b. 1940), Pat Steir (b. 1940) and Joyce Kozloff (b. 1942). N. Yankowitz first began visiting the East End of Long Island in the 1970s. Her experience of the natural environment – specifically the calls of birds and insects – impacted her work in sound art. Later, in 1993, she purchased a home in Sag Harbor, and she continues to work between the East End and New York City.
Viewer participation and immersive environments have been critical elements of her work. Multimedia installations have explored topics including women scientists unrecognised for their significant discoveries, and her interactive game installations Crossings and Criss-Crossing the Divine exposed the relative perspectives of religions found in texts across the globe.

Her works are held in collections including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, Richmond; and the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. N. Yankowitz has held teaching positions at the School of Visual Arts and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 2024 she was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Hall of Fame. She has been featured in exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (1970); Art Institute of Chicago (1972); Kunsthaus, Hamburg (1972); MoMA PS1, New York (1982); Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (1998); Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York (2005; 2014); and MuseumsQuartier Vienna (2011). She is the subject of a 2025 retrospective exhibition, Nina Yankowitz: In the Out/Out the In, organised by the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida, curated by Katherine Pill, and travelling to the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York.