Inside the Art of Brandusa Niro

Romanian-born, Palm Beach and New York–based artist Brandusa Niro has lived many creative lives: from film and publishing to writing and now painting luminous, emotionally charged portraits that feel both timeless and otherworldly. Working mostly in oils on linen, Niro transforms memory, storytelling, and decades of encounters with extraordinary women into striking figurative works that blur the line between beauty and mystery. Following the success of her celebrated Models and About a Girl series – and as she continues developing her new body of work, Characters – Niro remains a masterful narrator of the human spirit. She will be exhibiting at Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary, March 19-23, and her work will also be featured in Holiday Design House Wellington from March 4 through May 3, 2026. Miami Living Magazine sits down with the artist to explore the stories, inspirations, and personal history behind her unforgettable faces.

 Very Cherie

Miami Living (ML): You come from a remarkably creative family and began your own artistic journey at a very young age. How does your background – both your early life in Romania and your family’s artistic legacy – shape the way you live and create today?

Brandusa: I grew up among extraordinarily successful creative people – my uncle Toma Caragiu was a legendary actor of both film and theatre, my mother Matilda Caragiu was a Member of the Romanian Academy, authored 19 books, had a weekly TV show on language and a weekly column in the Romanian equivalent of the New Yorker, among many other achievements. My aunt Geta Caragiu was a brilliant sculptor whose work is in museums all over Europe. I grew up fast among them, as if life was pushing me forth from the earliest age.

I was speaking perfectly at age 2, read at age 3, finished Mark Twain’s novels at age 4, wrote poetry and prose (some published in literary magazines) and started painting seriously at 8. My aunt enrolled me in private classes with a renowned figurative expressionist painter, between ages 8 and 14, and she also spent a lot of time with me in her sculpture studio, teaching me how to figure draw and sculpt – to this day there is a bust of me on a marble pedestal in our family garden in Bucharest that I made under her exacting supervision (and help) when I was 10. When I turned 6, she gifted me three shelves of books on the lives and oeuvre of the most important artists of all time, which I devoured. I won two national art prizes at ages 14 and 15, one was for a work on glass and the other for an oil on paper. Geta was beyond disappointed when I chose to become an actress, following in my uncle Toma’s path…

For nearly three years she snuck me as a guest student into figure drawing and painting classes at the Fine Arts College where she was a professor, so I was able to pursue my passion for art as well as my acting studies and graduated with an MFA. I had finished high school at 17, we were on an accelerated track for gifted students, I wish we had that here, it is an amazing, beautiful challenge — yes, you have classes non-stop, including Saturdays, but you are able to became versed in more than one art and step into your future faster, and be extraordinarily prolific. Not to mention the built-in work ethic. That is a trend that has defined my life. I am a relentless omni-creative and would not have it any other way. 

Autumn Muse

ML: Your figures are instantly recognizable: elongated, luminous, and almost otherworldly. Where did the inspiration for this distinctive visual language come from, and how did it evolve into such a defining part of your work?

 Brandusa: I have conceived hundreds of fashion covers for the magazine I created in 2002, The Daily Front Row. IMG was my backer and they had the most powerful modeling agency in the world, one floor up from my offices. I had the unique opportunity to meet the most glorious models of our time from the very start of their careers, and they became my muses. Their beauty in that moment in time when they were in their teens, nature’s purest work of art, was indeed otherworldly. It’s as if a light shone on them as they glided in slow motion through the air around them, mesmerizing everyone in their path.

Then and there, I decided that portraits are what I will do for the rest of my life. While in the many years past I had painted everything, from a foot in the grass, to a golden valley with Peruvian horses in distant perspective, to a chinoiserie vase in the Antibes afternoon sunlight, once these girls stepped into my life it was like a vision came to me, a certain look, a certain style of portraiture that became my signature. Like my Daily, which was “the most original magazine to come out in decades” to quote magazine legend Graydon Carter, my portraits are unlike anything seen before, and I have my muses to thank for that.

Dora

ML: The “About a Girl” series began with a chance meeting with a young girl named Jacqueline. What was it about that moment that stayed with you deeply enough to become a body of work?

Brandusa: Jacqueline was 10 years old and the atmosphere of her face moved me instantly. She often had early dinner with her grandmother at La Colombe d’Or in St. Paul de Vence, in the South of France where my husband and I have spent many summers. We got to know each other and learn her story, which is too private to recount here, but suffice it to say she invited me to her house which was perched on a cliff and had a steep stairway leading to a wild natural garden, where she introduced me to her little menagerie: a huge white dog name Attila, a pheasant named Louis, a goose, two ducks, a giant turtle and a big fat parrot who repeated just one phrase: Pas Possible! I thought of her a lot and painted her a lot. She was an enormous inspiration. I could paint only Jacqueline for a year – but my gallerist won’t let me!

Jacqueline and Louis

ML: Your work often explores a kind of beauty that feels emotional, even haunting, rather than purely aesthetic. What makes beauty ‘unfathomable’ to you?

Brandusa: It’s impossible. You marvel at it, you treasure every second of it, because it is fleeting. It’s a sublime light that is only shed on a human briefly. That’s what I mean about a moment in time. Beauty continues throughout life, but the unfathomable phase is brief and intangible, a divine whisper.

ML: When someone stands in front of one of your portraits for a long time, what do you hope is happening inside them?

Brandusa: One of my collectors told me that my painting has lifted her when she was down, has shared in her joy, and has become the centerpiece of her home and in a certain way, her life. It speaks to her, they communicate, it is what art does, it creates an eternal dialogue with the human who looks at it, REALLY looks at it. 

Portraits are unique that way. Unlike a landscape or still life or an abstract piece, you truly must bond with it, it is a person that will look you in the eye for a long, long time. You have to fall in love with each other, the portrait and you. 

The Little Ballerina

ML: You’ve lived such a rich, internationally creative life. At this moment, in your studio, what feels most alive and inspiring for you right now?

Brandusa: I have been to every runway season in Paris, Milan, London, Florence, NY, for two decades, I lived in Paris for a long time, spent every summer on the Cote d’Azur, and now is the time in my life where I live in my own tropical paradise in Palm Beach, where light is everything, and where the balmy, salty breeze of the ocean travels far enough to reach me in my studio. Half the year my studio is my garden and the other half it is in a luminous space with cathedral ceilings in my house — this is where I feel alive, blessed, and grateful. 

ML: After such a dynamic and multifaceted life, what feels most important to you in this chapter – not as an artist or public figure, but simply as Brandusa?

Brandusa:  Bringing joy and beauty to the world. This has always been my path. Every painting is another message in a bottle, meant to bring you joy and love and beauty when it one day finds you, as it washes ashore glistening in the sun just enough to draw your attention, whether now or long after I’m gone.

Brandusa is represented by Avant Gallery and can be contacted at studio@brandusaniro.com

By ML Staff. Images courtesy of Brandusa Niro