Timna Naim

Timna Naim, a San Jose-based artist, explores identity, play, and community through interdisciplinary work integrating ceramic sculpture, installation, and performance. Their practice centers on tactility, storytelling, and participation, using vibrant colors, abstract forms, and interactive elements to spark the imagination. Blending improvisation with rigor, their work begins with tension, resolved through fantastical play, crafted beauty, and playful messiness. They investigate social norms and material relationships, questioning how humans shape and transform the world around them. As a queer, multi-ethnic immigrant and artist with North African and Eastern European roots, Timna explores the fluidity of identity while highlighting our responsibility to continually reshape ourselves, our spaces, and our material environment with intention and care. 

Timna Naim holds an MFA in Spatial Art and an MA in Teaching. They chair the Art Department and teach ceramics at Fremont High School, and also teach ceramics at SJSU. Naim has been in residence at the Zentrum für Keramik and the Ponderosa Dance Center in Germany, TEOR/ÉTICA, and UCR in Costa Rica. 

Programs:

• Marcus Exhibition When the World is Beautifully Strange (2025)