Nina Ivanovna Shirokova was born in Tarusa, in a family of a carpenter and a teacher. She was always fond of drawing, and from her early years she took private classes in drawing. Thematically, she paints landscapes in bright and powerful colours, still-lives, as well as nudes and portraits. She is a highly skilled and inspired draughtsman, with a simple and bold line. Her favourite media are pencil, gouache, tempera and watercolour. Nina Ivanovna’s works are a bright example of the artistic freedom that many former students of the Moscow Textile Institute were able to take advantage of. They were not educated according to, and consequently not artistically limited by, the dogmas of the Socialist Realism. Her personal works were very rarely shown publicly in the 1960s-2000, particularly the works painted in her Bilyutin period. Nina Ivanovna now lives and paints in Moscow.
