Jana Dobreva
Down to the Roots: Brain Wiring
01.02 – 28.02
Neuro-Spice & Everything Nice
Neuro-Spice & Everything Nice is a ten-part comic project exploring neurodivergence through a scientific, evolutionary, and deeply human lens. Playing on the familiar rhyme What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice, and all that's nice, and the self-descriptive term of some members of the neurodivergent community “neuro-spicy” – an attempt to avoid pathologizing, labeling and social stigma, the project hopes to show how neurodivergence can shape perception, emotion, creativity, and survival. It aims to deepen our understanding and awareness of neurodiversity by weaving together evolutionary insight with the warmth and vulnerability of lived experience, making complex ideas relatable and playful. Neuro-Spice & Everything Nice highlights the human value of cognitive diversity and invites readers to reflect on the beauty, challenges, and strengths found in different minds. After all, being understood and acknowledged for one’s perceptions and experiences is a core need of every human being.
As a child, Jana Dobreva often found social interactions confusing and struggled to identify with any one group or gender. She struggled with some tasks that others seemed to find so easy. As a young girl, she was always trying to adapt to different people, environments and activities. She felt like she was different, but her artistic upbringing and education mostly played to her strengths of creativity and abstract thinking. It was only much later, as an adult, that she learned about concepts like neurodiversity, executive function disorder, sensory overload, bottom-up processing and emotional and nervous system regulation. For the first time, she was able to put names to her experiences and understand herself in a new way. The world opened up to her, and she quickly jumped down the rabbit hole of "neurospiciness." This project reflects some of the ideas, concepts and experiences that she has encountered in that time.
About Jana Dobreva
Jana Dobreva is an illustrator and educator from Bulgaria, based in South Africa. She holds a Master’s degree in Comics and Illustration from LUCA School of Arts in Brussels, and Bachelor’s degrees in Illustration and Graphic Design, and in Theory and Practice of Art Education from the National Academy of Art in Sofia.
Jana Dobreva’s artwork is dream-like, detail-focused, and sensory-engaged. It is a place of psychedelic wonder, observation and quiet freedom and escape. It has been exhibited in Brussels, Gent, and Sofia, including Moving Word (Atelier OFFoff, Gent), Coupe (Vite Publishing Gallery E²/Sterput, Brussels), Sofia Comics Expo (Union of Bulgarian Artists, Sofia), and Contemporary Bulgarian Illustration (Sofia City Library). She has received First Prize in the Behance Portfolio Reviews supported by EPIC Agency and Wallonie Design Liège. Alongside her artistic practice, Jana works as an educator, exploring her lifelong interest in pedagogy, psychology, and human behaviour.
