Photo © Natela Grigalashvili

Nadia Beard is a journalist, critic and pianist. She is a regular contributor to the Financial Times and her articles, essays, and criticism also appear in publications including The New Yorker, National Geographic, the Guardian, the Economist, and the Times Literary Supplement, among others. She is currently the programming director for Zeg: Tbilisi Storytelling Festival. Between 2017 and 2022, she was editor-in-chief of The Calvert Journal, an award-winning magazine covering contemporary art, culture and society in Russia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus. Prior to that, she was Moscow correspondent for The Independent. She is a graduate of University College London, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Tbilisi Conservatoire. She has been an Alfa Fellow and was named a 2017 Kathryn Davis Fellow for Peace from Middlebury College, Vermont. 

beardnadia@gmail.com 

A strange, wonderful corner of Europe. God bless the artists who open their homes/factories/sanatoriums/thermal bath to writers et al. What a week
The rarest afternoon. 20 short minutes spent walking among 600-year old figures, standing at eye-level with the Brancacci Chapel frescoes, currently under restoration. Masolino and Masaccio, from 1427
Excited to make my debut in @newyorkermag this week with a profile of the strange, extreme, mildly goofy artist Andrei Molodkin. In a former sanatorium in the Pyrenees, Molodkin is filling a 32-ton Swiss bank safe with artworks by Picasso, Rembrandt,
An essay in @ft_weekend on the "wunderalten" -- the older prodigy -- and the relationship between age and creativity. I listened to a lot of music while writing this essay, going backwards and forwards in one or other composer's oeuvre to
A new neighbourhood and new Bach in its honour 👀
After 20 years as a visitor to @royaloperahouse, I spent a happy November afternoon on one of its stages. An honour to talk about Bronislava Nijinska and the avant-garde in the Clore Studio and watch dancers at the @royalballetschool in action. Thank
So long this September 🥀
A month on the continent 🐚
Exhilarating, played with notes and peppered with mistakes but yesterday was a first and it was fun! Thanks @matthewhardy86 for the opportunity and for keeping us all in check 🎶
A happy sigh. Just the greatest delight to give the keynote speech at @zegfest this year about music and my beloved Tbilisi, and to be in conversation with Giorgi Gigashvili who blessed us with a performance of Chopin's last ballade, an obvious choic
Brodsky weather
March was music and its theatres. (And if there's a more obscenely lavish interior than the Opéra Comique, I'd like to see it. The last photo is *the bar*)
A souvenir from 2010. This slipped out from some music I clearly hadn't opened in 13 years (!). 21 years old and playing the cello during a summer chamber music course named "Es Muss Sein" after Beethoven. A serendipitous re-discovery when
By the lakes ✨️
I wrote an essay for the @ft_weekend extolling the many joys of life as an amateur pianist and what re-learning the piano as an adult has taught me about life. The wonderful @natela_grigalashvili came to my home and the conservatoire to take photos