My name is Nika Aila States. I’m a photographer, writer, designer, and musician working from Berkeley, California. As a land-obsessed creative with a large collection of Bay Nature magazines at home, I jumped at the chance to apply for the 2026 fellowship.
I’ve made you a little landing page to point you to work that’s probably most relevant, but please feel free to explore at your leisure. Links in the white box should open a new tab in your browser, but if you accidentally navigate away from this unlisted page, you can type its url (nikastates.com/baynature) back into your browser.
Hi there, Bay Nature!
If you want a general overview of the kind of photo work I’ve done, navigate freely from the photo portfolio. The San Pablo and Old School Path galleries include both writing about place and digital photo sequences. The writing voice in these projects is more personalized and poetic.
I design maps using industry standard GIS tools, but I also make more artistic maps in illustrator and a number of drawing programs. The Cartography section on my design page includes a few samples.
The Diego Garcia map plates in that section include more academically-leaning text samples than the writing in the photo gallery links. They were a part of thesis work at UC Berkeley’s Geography department, and won the Cartography Award for my graduating year.
The ArcGIS story map project “Fort Ordnance” was born out of a long-standing interest in the environmental legacies of military land use and a personal history of frequent visits to the base.
If you’d like a look at my resume, you can download it here.
