Nana Bors
The doorway of Nana Bors's studio in Thailand, works on easels and against the walls

Hungary · b. 1946 · Thailand

Nana Bors

In the studio, 2026 · Photograph by Teresa Laqua

Edit Bors was born in Hungary and spent four decades as a journalist, writing about famous people rather than being one. At sixty-five she moved to Auroville, the international community in southern India, and stayed ten years. She now lives and works in Thailand.

She picked up a brush for the first time at seventy-seven, with no training and no intention of becoming an artist. Around sixty works exist. Her first exhibition opened in 2026, at eighty.

The work is mixed media: acrylic on canvas, body monoprints, ecoprints, calligraphic brushwork, and textile and found material built into dimensional assemblage. There is no house style. It sits in the territory of art brut and outsider expressionism, held together by a recurring gold ground drawn from Byzantine and Indian iconography, and by a consistent refusal to correct anything.

She describes the source of the work as the heavenly floor, and herself as a self-surpriser.

She works and exhibits as Nana Bors. Her legal name is Edit Bors.

Nana Bors seated on her studio floor holding a raffia sculpture
Born
Hungary
Previously
Journalist, four decades
India
Ten years in Auroville
Based
Thailand
First painting
Age 77
First exhibition
2026, age 80
Works to date
Around 60
Series
Six
Media
Acrylic, monoprint, ecoprint, textile, assemblage
“As so often, I felt that the hand of what I call the heavenly level was working through me.” On The Artist with Bird and a Little Cat