Najma Dawood

The Studio

Things I make when no one is paying me to.

A room for the work that doesn't fit under a client brief — fiction, visual art, and the quiet practice of paying attention. Updated when it wants to be, not when a calendar says so.

Najma Dawood

Writing

A three-book series about Black women in the wellness industry — ambition, loyalty, love, and loss in a world that makes them compete for scraps of visibility.

Newsletter

Excerpts, drafts, and the occasional essay — on Substack.

Visual Art

Subductress

Digital illustration · Triptych · 2024

An invented word — submerged and seductress, drawn from tectonic subduction: when one plate slides, quiet and uncredited, beneath another. The series sits with themes of concealment, transformation, and power through obfuscation — the tension between public image and private truth.

Subductress · I
Subductress · II
Subductress · III

Accoutrement

Digital illustration · Diptych · 2025

Accoutrement means gear — the equipment carried by a soldier, a traveler, someone prepared. The diptych sits with women who refuse to give you their face: hyper-visible as ornament and completely withheld as self. The long nails are armor. The rings are sigils. What's usually dismissed as adornment reveals itself as kit — load-bearing on a body moving through the world.

Accoutrement · I
Accoutrement · II

For editors, agents, curators, collaborators

Open to residencies, group shows, reading invitations, and conversations with good agents.

najma@nyu.edu →