Willa Van Nostrand
Multidisciplinary Artist + Curator | Embodied Performance + Ritual
2026 ー Graduate Studies: Expressive + Creative Arts, Holistic Counseling Program, Salve Regina University
2025 ー Goldman Sachs 10KSB Certificate of Entrepreneurship (Co. 25), CCRI
2023 ー Recipient of City of Providence Outstanding Citizen Award*
2019 ー Recipient of Providence Design Catalyst Award*
2010 ー Founded World’s Fair Gallery + Little Bitte
2005 ー 2009 Sarah Lawrence College B.A. in Theatre & Visual Art
2007 ー 2008 Il Bisonte School of Printmaking, Intaglio, Florence, Italy
2005 ー The Putney School, Putney, VT
Willa Van Nostrand (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, curator, and writer whose practice investigates the relationships between embodiment, ritual, material culture, and collective experience. Working across sculpture, masks, movement, sound, voice, food, and participatory performance, she explores how physical gestures, sensory encounters, and shared actions shape our experience of ourselves, one another, and the world around us. Her research engages goddess cultures, religious traditions, sacred music, and embodied ritual practices, considering how knowledge is transmitted through the body and how artistic experience can bring people into fuller contact with themselves and one another. Through performance, Van Nostrand creates participatory situations in which the body becomes a means of inquiry, connection, and transformation.
Van Nostrand is the founder and artistic director of World’s Fair Gallery, an experiential art space in Providence, and the founder of Little Bitte (Bitte Artisanal Foodways), an award-winning garden-to-glass practice rooted in seasonal ingredients, botanical materials, and relationships with more than twenty farms across New England. She has collaborated with glass artist Eva Goodman since 2018 on projects combining sculpture, movement, and audience participation. Van Nostrand teaches masterclasses at Johnson & Wales University, ALMA Scuola in Parma, and Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her work and writing has appeared in Vogue, The Boston Globe, Cherry Bombe, Domino, Edible Rhody, Serious Eats, and Food52. She holds a BA in Theatre and Visual Art from Sarah Lawrence College and studied printmaking at Il Bisonte in Florence, Italy.
