Nikki O’Connell Muise is a designer and a graphic and fine artist, revealing her love for both nature and architecture in her work. She enjoys being able to use her natural artistic talent along with her extensive technical skills to create art – for art’s sake and for practical use – through many and varied mediums, including digital art, screenprinting, drawing and painting.

Born and raised in Southern California, Nikki had a childhood full of outdoor experiences and adventures, from backpacking in the Sierras to summers spent on the beach. Although always drawn to the arts, after moving to Chicago for five years she took a career path down a technical road, returning to California to create a training department at a software development company. Eventually she struck out on her own, teaching and developing programs for Fortune 500 companies. After tiring of the grind of her technical career, and to satisfy her artistic side, Nikki realized she could be “creating” for a living, and returned to school to get her interior design and drafting degrees. She traveled extensively, gearing most of her travels to study architecture, so it wasn’t a stretch for her then to combine her technical background with her talent for design and her love of architecture to start an interior and exterior design company.

Nikki’s mother, Roz Springer, rediscovered her own love for painting and the arts when she moved to Silver City, New Mexico in 1994. After visiting her mother several times a year for about 11 years, Nikki also packed up and moved to Silver City in 2006, where her life took many happy turns. She returned to school once again to study graphic arts and finish her bachelor degree in fine arts at Western New Mexico University, where she discovered her passions for painting and screenprinting. Nikki found her art evolving in the open, uncrowded land of New Mexico, allowing her to loosen up from the confines of her more structured technical art, turning towards nature, and she has recently completed a series of botanical editions. In addition to her studies at WNMU, Nikki currently serves on the board of the Mimbres Region Arts Council, has been a member of Grant County Art Guild, The American Society of Interior Designers and The American Society of Architectural Illustrators, and has taught AutoCAD classes at the university. She has also won awards for her hypertufa pottery that she creates as a hobby.