A native of San Antonio, Nivia Gonzalez left Texas in 1966 in favor of Greenwich Village. She attended Cooper Union for a time on a full scholarship, and from there, her trek led her to Miami and later to Houston. She earned her B.A. in Studio Art from Trinity University in San Antonio in 1983 and her M.A. in
Art Education from The University of Texas at Austin in 1987.

Nivia credits her family for forging the creative energies within her. Her grandmother was an art teacher in Mexico, and her father was a natural storyteller. As a young child, she and her father would select words and phrases and playfully construct short stories together. By the age of seven, Nivia was writing and illustrating poems. Nivia's appreciation of the bold colors that characterize her work are a gift from her mother. Schooled in interior design, Nivia's mother saw to it that the family home was filled with bold, never muted, colors that were always changing.

Nivia draws much of her inspiration from her twin daughters, who feature in many of her paintings:

"Years ago, when my kids were younger, I used to have them underpaint and it would leave impressions… I would then paint based on the smudges my kids had left."

Nivia has received national and international acclaim for her artwork. In 1986, Nivia launched the Bexar County Jail Arts Program in San Antonio, spending 20 hours a week teaching inmates to paint. With her guidance, the inmates created a 10'x15' mural of la Virgen de Guadalupe that was used as a backdrop when Pope John Paul II visited San Antonio in 1987. She was inducted into the San Antonio Women's Hall of Fame in 1996 and has provided artwork for the covers of books by renowned authors including Alice Walker and Sandra Cisneros.

Her career came to a tragic halt one night in 1997:

"…after my car broke down on the highway, I began to try to cross the freeway on foot in search of help. I was then struck by a truck pulling horses and I was thrown 50 feet up in the air.  My family was told that I literally died three times en route to the trauma center. Because of the traumatic brain injury that I suffered, or perhaps the stroke that I also suffered, when I came out of my coma, I was unable to walk or talk. I lost the use of the left side of my body. To me the worst injury I suffered was that I was now unable to paint because I am a left-handed artist."

Nivia continues to suffer from memory loss and limited mobility on the left side. She spent over a decade recovering from this debilitating accident, unable to paint. She slowly regained control of her left hand and began painting again by making tiny strokes on the canvas:

"You've heard of all the people like Jesse Treviño who learn to paint with their other hand. Not me. I just waited and waited until I got the feeling back in my left hand. Sometimes I have to hold my left hand—put my right hand under my left arm—so I can reach the canvas, but I just wanted to paint the way God made me to paint, with my left hand."

These painstaking efforts eventually blossomed into many of the beautiful pieces displayed on this website.

Now residing in Austin amidst "glorious trees in a huge yard," Nivia paints in her light-filled home studio, continually thanking God for her spiritual strength, which she says helped her believe she could recover, as she repeatedly told herself, "You can beat this, you know you can."