Born and raised in the Panama Canal Zone, Republic of Panama, the author graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in art history. Prior to living in D.C. and Florida, she worked for McGraw-Hill, Inc. in Dallas, Texas, and for the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory in Austin, Texas. Throughout her professional career as a Federal civil servant in D.C., she found time for classes in modern ballet, belly dance, photography, writing classes, and painting. 

After a thirty-year career as an analyst and regulatory writer for three agencies of the U.S. Treasury Department in the District of Columbia and in Florida, she currently lives in the southeastern United States. She continues to paint, draw, and write, and has been developing a new fiction that explores the intersections of ritual, ecology, and female creative power. Her two pets are a yellow canary and a Brussels Griffon.

From someone who knows her through the years, Armida Nagy Rose is a reclusive, multidisciplinary artist and writer who publishes fiction under a nom de plume. Her work moves effortlessly between visual art, poetry, and narrative fiction, fusing spiritual inquiry, cultural history, and embodied practice into stories and workshops that invite close attention and quiet transformation.

Born into a family steeped in diasporic histories and contemporary religious beliefs, she developed an early fascination with myth, movement, and the material traces of memory. Her visual work—acrylics, watercolors, and pen-and-ink drawings—earned regional recognition when she was named Artist of the Month by the North of Tampa Arts League in the early 2000s. She also served on the board of the Coalition of Hispanic Artists in Hillsborough County, organizing community exhibitions that paired archival research with contemporary visual experiments.

As an educator, Armida created Zen Tango Art: Meditative Drawing in Pen & Ink, a practical manual published in 2011 that pairs intuitive mark-making with focused observation and contemplative attention. She led workshops that translate the book’s techniques into accessible exercises for artists, writers, and people seeking art as a mindfulness practice.

Her literary output spans poetry, short prose, and longer fiction. Early poems and visual pieces appear in anthologies such as Waves of Wonder and Reflections: The Olli-USF 20th Anniversary Collection, where she contributed both writing and imagery. Several early essays and art pieces were published online between 2012 and 2013. She has also taught introductory Quintessential Tibetan Buddhism at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of South Florida. Working from an initial screenplay for Daughters of the Dance and having trained in belly dance for several years, she expanded her narrative vision into The Armida Trilogy, a multi‑generational sequence of novels that interweaves history, comparative mythology, and spiritual symbolism to examine women’s agency across three centuries.

Armida’s fiction is characterized by richly textured settings, ethically engaged protagonists, and by an interest in the body as ritual. Her first novel, Daughters of the Dance, reframes the danse du ventre as a spiritual discipline similar to Sufism and as a cultural memory within Sephardic‑Ladino networks. Book Two, Choir of Cloistered Canaries, blends epidemiology, environmental activism, and mysticism to ask how science and spirituality might together defend the commons.

Despite her private nature, Armida has participated in public life through curated lectures, intimate salons, and virtual conversations that pair historical scholarship with embodied practice until she became afflicted by multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS). Since 2009, she became an advocate of living a life that reduces exposure to toxic chemicals, primarily, those that are derived from petroleum. The novel, Choir of Cloistered Canaries, broaches this theme in a limited manner.