Artist in Residence, Stockholm, 18 November 2025–20 February 2026

Nina Paim is a designer and publisher based in Porto. Born and raised in Nova Friburgo, Brazil, she has lived in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Portugal. These moves have sometimes brought feelings of isolation, but they also led her to seek out community and build an international network that is now central to her practice. She is especially interested in how books, exhibitions, and events can create spaces where people meet, share, learn, and change together. Her work focuses on directing, supporting, and collaborating – mainly through her roles as a curator and editor. She reflects on how ideas become practice, and how practice shapes ideas, drawing on her own path into feminist publishing.

Nina Paim

During her residency at IASPIS, she will focus on developing several upcoming titles for her own publishing house, Bikini Books, dedicated to advancing feminist perspectives in design.

Besides Bikini Books, Nina has also co-organized etceteras: feminist festival of publishing and design (Porto, 2023). She co-founded the feminist platform Futuress.org in 2020, which she co-directed until 2023, and co-edited Design Struggles (Valiz, 2021). She has also co-curated exhibitions and public programmes such as Feminist Findings (Berlin, 2020), Department of Non-Binaries (Sharjah, 2018), and Beyond Change (Basel, 2018).

Nina Paim holds a BA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and an MA from the HKB University of Applied Sciences in Bern, Switzerland. A three-time recipient of the Swiss Design Awards, she has taught and lectured internationally. Her writing has been published by Occasional Papers, Les presses du réel, ESAD-IDEA, Aveditions, and the Korea Society of Typography. In 2024, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of the Arts London.