Alexandra Nechita

Biography

Alexandra’s father, Niki Nechita, escaped from Communist Romania three months before she was born. His daughter was born on 27 August 1985 in Vaslui, and she and her mother, Viorica, had to wait two years before they were allowed to join him in the United States. The family settled in California: her father found work as a lab technician, and her mother became an office manager.

She began drawing very early. At two she worked in pen and ink, by five she had taken up watercolours, and by seven she had moved on to oils and acrylics. Her first solo exhibition was held when she was eight, at the public library in Whittier, in Los Angeles County. She was then a student at a private school in Orange County, Orange Lutheran High School. In 1995, at ten, she was taken to Paris, to the Mourlot Studios, which are known for lithographic printing. In the same year she signed with International Art Publishers and became the youngest artist the company had signed. By early 1996 she had already given sixteen solo exhibitions.

She came to wide public attention in early 1997, when she was commissioned to design the program for the 39th Annual Grammy Awards. She was eleven, and by some reports she was the youngest artist to have made that design. At twelve the press and the art world dubbed her the “Petite Picasso”. The occasion was both her paintings and the fact that people found them similar to the work of Pablo Picasso: bright, fragmented Cubist compositions in which figures and faces are broken up across the flat surface. I would not speak of any direct kinship with Picasso; it is rather a manner that viewers picked up on. She was a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show, appeared alongside President Bill Clinton, and in 1998 played herself in the episode “Better Than The Average Cory” of the teen sitcom Boy Meets World. The theatre at that school bears her name.

In November 1999 the World Federation of United Nations Associations chose her to lead a Global Arts Initiative involving more than a hundred countries. In 2005 in Singapore she unveiled her United Nations Peace Monument for Asia, intended for the Catholic High School. She later joined the Board of Selectors of the Jefferson Awards for Public Service.

In 2007 Nicole Lapin of CNN interviewed her for the series Young People Who Rock. Her awards include Outstanding Artist of the Year (Lincoln Center, New York), an award for young people in Osaka, and Woman of the Year from the American Red Cross.

In 2008 she graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in fine arts. She lives in Los Angeles.