Jana Navratilova was born and raised in Slovakia, and grew up a free spirit with a fascination for emotive portraits. She got her first camera - an old Russian Zorki - for her ninth birthday and she has been taking photographs ever since. "The visual aesthetic of images from old film cameras influenced my style from the very beginning. I used to develop photos in a makeshift darkroom, because I loved the magical moments of excitement while waiting to see the image appear on the paper while immersed in miraculous emulsions," Jana says.

 

Jana graduated from Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia with a Master's degree in Journalism and moved to San Francisco a year later to study Photography at San Francisco Studio School of Drawing, Painting, Photography and Mixed Media under abstract painters Lon Clark and Laura Harden. While living in San Francisco, Jana was exposed to art theory and fine arts exhibitions at SFMoMA, Legion of Honor and the de Young Museum. It was in San Francisco that she started exploring street photography. "Surrounded by art museums, I regularly visited exhibits of street photographers that created black and white impressions of the environment they lived in.  I valued these images as charming snippets of pure life moments that will never repeat again," Jana added. Street scenes were unraveling in front of her eyes, so she began to intepret these simple daily moments into something magical on a 2-dimensional plane. She was absolutely enchanted by Chinatown's chaos and unorganized order. 

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Strongly influenced by her life in San Francisco, Jana’s work predominantly explores urban landscapes, focusing on the relationships of humans and the spaces they live in. These captured observations are often intertwined with abstract and meditative impressions, or as she likes to call them - urban daydreams. Her expressive style transfers throughout her body of work of photography, cold wax painting and pottery.

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