About Nicole

HEY HI HELLO

I’m Nicole Zappala—an artist, experience designer, facilitator, and community builder exploring creativity as a way back to ourselves and to each other.

I make art you can look at, wear, walk into, participate in, and sometimes completely change.

My work moves between painting, mixed media, wearable art, participatory experiences, temporary spaces, community gatherings, and creative work with organizations. The form changes. The impulse underneath it doesn’t: create something that makes people feel, notice, connect, wonder, or see what’s possible a little differently.

I believe creativity is something we practice—not something reserved for people who call themselves artists. So much of my work is designed around participation: lowering the stakes, loosening our grip on getting it right, and making enough room for curiosity to take over.

Sometimes that means covering a giant canvas in paint with a group of strangers. Sometimes it means making something under blacklight, turning an empty storefront into a temporary creative world, gathering a neighborhood around art, or helping a leadership team experience its culture instead of simply talking about it.

The art matters. But what happens around the art matters just as much.

My Story

I didn’t take a straight path here.

Before becoming a full-time artist, I spent many a moon working in tech, much of it thinking about community, experience, communication, and the way people feel inside organizations. At the same time, I was slowly finding my way back to creativity.

I reconnected with my inner artist in 2018 after moving back to San Diego. What began with taking art classes and exploring North Park’s creative community eventually became a regular practice—and then something I couldn't imagine not building my life around.

When I went looking for studio space, a series of dead ends led to a different question: what if I stopped waiting for the right space and started creating with what was already here?

That question became The Rainbow, my evolving studio and experience-space concept that temporarily brings creativity into underused spaces before their next chapter begins.

It also became a much bigger philosophy for my work: very little can become more than enough when we approach it with curiosity.

Today, I bring together the worlds I once thought were separate—art, experience design, community, organizational culture, play, and human connection.

I make things. I make spaces for other people to make things. And increasingly, I’m interested in what becomes possible when we make something together.