Jan Nimmo is a Glasgow based artist, designer and award winning filmmaker who studied at Glasgow School of Art. Over the past 25 years she has worked on a wide range of creative projects, encompassing solo exhibitions, interior, textile and graphic design, filmmaking, research into Latin American popular arts and facilitating issues based art projects for community groups.
She has explored an equally wide variety of media, from painting, collage and printmaking to photography and moving image.
Jan's recent work is essentially people centred and looks at the lives that people lead - from portraits of musicians and artisans from Latin America to documenting picket lines in Ecuador; from transcriptions of banana workers' testimonies to recording oral history in Scotland.
Jan sees her role as that of bridge-builder, creating direct links between people and across cultures, focusing on social and environmental justice and recording stories that would otherwise be lost. A fluent Spanish speaker, Jan has developed a specialist working knowledge of popular Mexican art and Cuban traditional music. She spent much of 2015 making portraits which pay tribute to the Ayotzinapa 43+, students who were forcibly disappeared in Mexico in September 2014.
In 2000 she initiated a collaborative art project, Green Gold, which documents the lives of banana workers in Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador and Cameroon, through portrait, testimony, installation and film. Both of her award winning documentaries from the project, Bonita and Pura Vida, have been broadcast and screened at festivals internationally. Her most recent work is Portraits from Cameroon.
