Nessa Dziemian is an illustrator and skier based in Canada. We love her unique vision and interpretation of the skiing experience. We al love spring skiing, we caught up with Nessa to ask her about her background in art and skiing.

I was on the US Ski team for about 11 years. I think six of those were on World Cup and the other five were on the development team. I oh my God where do I begin? I think I was known to push the sport in the realm of jumping. I was probably one of the first female mogul skiers to land cork 10. I was also one of the first female skiers to compete cork seven to cork seven mute. I think after the 2020 season I was ranked 12th in the world. Unfortunately never got to go to the Olympics as I dreamed, I kept tearing my ACL like right before the games which was some type of curse or something. I coached my friend in Beijing 2022 so I got a different Olympic experience that was definately satisfying. Now I feel like I just tour and ski casually for fun. I started out like just skiing with my brother at ski school in Lincoln, New Hampshire and just kind of fell in love with skiing in the trees, hitting side hits and that eventually just translated into mogul skiing. Dodging trees and turning quickly and all the side hits just kind of felt really relatable to the mogul jumps so I would say that early passion for tree skiing really really got me into mogul skiing.

I always told myself that my two passions were skiing and drawing or art. So I think in my mind they always went together. Like I would ski during the day on the weekend and then I would go in for lunch and I would be drawing during lunch in the lodge and that kind of stayed with me. So the two have always existed together for me. I feel like drawing helped my skiing because I was pretty inconsistent for a while and I had a coach that was like "well you're constantly drawing so why don't you create a sketchbook that becomes kind of like your to do list". So I would draw every day and have these checklists like OK did you stretch today? Did you work out today? Did you drink enough water today? Stuff like that but next to it would be all of these little illustrations and drawings to help me stay focused on skiing. 

I feel like I still have a lot of the inspiration that I had as a kid. I remember going to sleep and seeing the snow cats on the mountain and I would be like "oh I wonder if the groomers are all seeing the animal skiing right now". Or when I would go tree skiing and it was so quiet that it felt like something magical was present. So I feel like a lot of the drawing I do is inspired by all the play that I did as a kid. I create stories, about my own skiing and the challenges, almost like creating little fantasies. An example is one time we were early season touring and the the snow was pretty low and we were up on the glacier where there were crevases that were hidden below the fall line. I was skiing and didn't notice that there was a crevass like right in front of me so I had to jump over and I landed on the other side completely fine but I remember creating the story of like "what's in the crevass and what else do you not know?" I think the answers to that type of curiosity needs to be fantasy and I find that's really fun for me. It's silly and not serious. Skiing can get serious sometimes, I think just taking that away and remembering that we're all just playing is important.