Tepoztlán on an April afternoon is the very definition of spring. The warmth, the cloudless skies over Cerro del Tepozteco, and the narrow streets that look like watercolors washed out by the sun’s rays all tell me that I have arrived at the Magical Town of Morelos. There I will meet with Nailea Norvind to piece together, from her memories and from the source, the story of her mother, Eva Norvind.
Actress, showgirl, journalist, photographer, feminist, writer, businesswoman, sex therapist, film director, mother, and dominatrix. Eva Norvind was a work of art; a disruptive woman who reinvented herself as many times as she left impressions on those who were close to her. Two decades later, Eva continues to inhabit the spaces she touched.
May 2026 marks the twentieth anniversary of his passing, the requiem for a dream—in earthly terms—that reads like the script for a New Wave film set in Mexico and New York.
“Sometimes, when I see all the complexity she carried, everything she did, and how it all branched out, I think about how linear and boring life can be. For me, it was important to hold on to some structure, because honestly, my mother was chaos,” her daughter Nailea tells me.
Eva Norvind: The Art of Reinventing Oneself
The actress’s home, a blend of rustic and avant-garde, sits on a cobblestone road leading up into the mountains. “This house is very Eva, because she started it,” she says. She offers me one of her homemade drinks, a ginger water kefir, and we settle into some geometric-patterned chairs in the second-floor living room, where the wind filters through the modernist windows.
All around are paintings, a colorful yoga mat, stray cats—many of them rescued by Nailea herself—black-and-white photos, and classical music LPs. On a dresser that looks like an altar sits an urn containing the ashes of Eva Norvind. On one occasion, she says, a thief scattered them while searching for jewelry.
“Eva had a deep love for this place,” says Nailea as she arranges some portraits. Part of that collection is being shown for the first time at Art Weekends.
Her daughters, Tessa Ia and Naian González Norvind, share a similar devotion to their grandmother Eva: “Yes, my daughters have great admiration for her—and a lot of respect in general.”
Eva Norvind: Inventing a Last Name, Inventing a Life
The surname Norvind didn’t exist. Eva created it as a pseudonym, and it means “north wind.” Her real name was Eva Johanne Chegodayeva Sakonskaya. She was born on May 7, 1944, in Trondheim, Norway. During the Nazi occupation, her grandparents were forced to work as translators for the Germans. But what is remembered in the family history is a much riskier story: “they passed information on to the resistance.”
When she visited Norway, Eva let her daughter Nailea play among the bunkers and tunnels that remained as vestiges of the war. At the top of a hill, there is still a structure with rusty cannons where Eva’s father was imprisoned by the Third Reich.
Nailea: A Name That Defines Her Destiny
Yes, the name Nailea was also the product of Eva’s imagination. “Some people say she had a relationship with the then-President of Mexico, Luis Echeverría Álvarez, because of the ‘lea’ in the name, but that’s not true. She wanted me to be unique and different. It took her a year to decide on my name, and she didn’t register me because she wanted me to choose my own name when I was old enough to do so.”
Nailea Norvind was born on February 16 in Mexico City, a couple of months before the opening of the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. She spent her early years between the capital and this mystical little town. Her earliest memories are of being in her pajamas, hugging her pillow, and getting out of bed when she heard her say, “We’re going to Tepoztlán for the weekend—hop in the back of the Volkswagen.”
Sometimes he refers to her as “Eva” and other times simply as “my mother.”
Not much is known about Nailea Norvind’s father. “There was a Mexican politician who wanted to have a child with a beautiful woman, someone like Eva. I’m sure he was impressed by that cascade of breasts and blonde hair,” Nailea adds, amused. “But she didn’t want those genes. At that time, Eva went to visit New York, and since she was ovulating, she decided to get pregnant by a Dutchman she met by chance—who, by the way, wanted to be an actor.”
Years later, in 2002, thanks to contacts at Endemol, the Dutch company that produced a show in which she appeared, Nailea tried to reconnect with that past and traveled to the Netherlands to participate in the television show Spoorloos, which tracks down lost relatives. Her mother went with her, and it was one of their greatest shared experiences. The attempt was in vain because Eva didn’t know the name of Nailea’s father. She had never asked him, and most likely he never knew either that he had a daughter in Mexico who would end up becoming an actress—the profession he had dreamed of for himself.
The absence of a father isn’t an unresolved issue for Nailea: “In life, you adapt to the circumstances you know. When you’ve never tasted something else, you can’t long for it. I always felt lucky growing up with my mother and my grandmother. They were my role models; it was better than having parents who fought. My mom served as the paternal, masculine figure.”
Following in the artistic footsteps of that matriarchal family, Nailea has enjoyed a remarkable career as a stage, film, and television actress. At the age of six, she made her debut in the play *Casa de Muñecas*, where her mother served as assistant director and photographer, in her first project while holding Mexican residency documents. In film, Nailea took her first steps in the movie The Bermuda Triangle.
Another of her first major roles was that of a scene-stealing villain in the soap opera *Quinceañera* in the late 1980s—a decade she, incidentally, says she detests: “I don’t feel like I belong to that era; I don’t like the music or the garish fashion.”
Some of her recent films include *Manto de gemas * and *Juana*. Eva wasn’t able to see them, but that was followed by one of the best periods of Nailea’s career, both in film and theater. “How I wish she were here now; I feel she would be so happy to see this. My mom was the one who believed in me the most. She always told me I had to do a lot of film work,” she recalls.
When she talks about the paintings on the walls of her house, she thinks of her grandmother, the Finnish-Norwegian sculptor Johanna Kajanus, who created many of the pieces. One of the paintings is a self-portrait; another depicts a forest where a tree is turning into a man. “My grandmother was a romantic: she loved to paint stories of love, Vikings, and mermaids.” In that story, the only thing missing is princes. Or so we thought.
The Myth Before Eve
Nailea’s grandfather was a Russian prince named Chegodayev-Sakonsky. Like so many other aristocrats, he was exiled to Paris following the political persecution triggered by the Revolution. There he met Johanna Kajanus, who had just won a bronze medal at an exhibition in France for a sculpture and was likely already planning some of the paintings that now adorn the house in Tepoztlán. They later fled to live with his family in Warsaw, before finally moving to Trondheim.
This fairy-tale family tree also includes Eva’s brother, Georg Kajanus, who was a member of the 1970s glam-rock band Sailor; and her great-grandfather, Robert Kajanus, founder of the Helsinki Conservatory.
The Early Life of Eva Norvind
She had always been drawn to art. At age 15, Eva arrived in Saint-Tropez in the south of France. There, one of her uncles, who owned the factory where the family worked, recognized her potential, encouraged her to sunbathe, exercise, and prepare to become an artist.
At sixteen, she entered a beauty pageant in Cannes and took second place. She then appeared in a French film. She decided she wanted to become a movie star. It was 1962 when Johanna fell in love and moved to Montreal with her new partner, Eva, and her brother, intending to establish an art academy in Canada.
There, Eva took her first steps in the arts. She began working at a variety theater in Quebec, though she soon felt the city was too small for her, “too provincial.” Broadway and its promise of ambition and excess appealed to her more than life in Canada, so she decided to try her luck as a showgirl in New York.
“In the United States, she started taking classes in everything she could: languages, dance, acting… But she also became a Playboy bunny at the Playboy Club, complete with bunny ears and a tight corset,” Nailea says with a laugh.
Back in 1964, Eva suffered a disappointment. She had fallen in love with an Italian man to whom, according to her daughter, “she wanted to give her virginity, but he didn’t want to be burdened with that.” Yes, Eva Norvind, the future dominatrix, the breaker of traditional norms in Mexico, the queen of high-octane sexual performance, was a virgin until she was 21, as she herself confesses in a biography and a film project that Nailea is currently working on.
The Road to Mexico
Heartbroken by that unrequited romance, Eva goes into exile in the nearest country: Mexico. She wants to take some time for herself and learn Spanish. She takes a bus—or “hitchhikes,” as Nailea suggests—from New York to Mexico City, and at the border, the last ten dollars she had are stolen from her.
She says she arrived on Reforma Avenue in Mexico City in the early hours of the morning, and with not a peso to her name, she begged for change on the street before turning to the Norwegian Embassy. “She soon forgot all about that; here she fell in love with the people, the colors, and the markets,” her daughter explains.
A pioneer of the sexual revolution
She ended up staying in Mexico for sixteen years. At first, she worked as a showgirl. “I studied Spanish over the summer, but then I decided to stay,” she recounts in the documentary by German filmmaker Monika Treut: Didn’t Do It for Love, which portrays Eva as a sexual pioneer. “I used to spend my Sundays in Plaza Garibaldi with my mariachi friends.”
He soon began acting in films. During his stay in Mexico, he filmed seven movies—many of them B movies—between 1965 and 1966. Among them were *Esta noche no*, *Pacto de sangre*, *Santo contra la invasión de los marcianos*, and the comedy for Mexican dandies *Don Juan 67*, starring Mauricio Garcés.
“In Mexico, I was an object of admiration, and that made it impossible for me to live in the real world,” Eva recalled in an interview published in the newspaper *Reforma* in 2006. By then, she was already known as “the Mexican Marilyn Monroe,” although she never actually became a Mexican citizen.
Back then, openly discussing contraception in the media was frowned upon. That’s why some of Eva’s statements caused a scandal. So much so that the government urged her to leave the country—she managed to avoid it, but was barred from appearing on Mexican television for a year—following her controversial appearance on Paco Malgesto’s show. “Perhaps she felt disappointed that Mexico didn’t have as much sexual freedom,” Nailea acknowledges.
After that episode, when she began to be turned down for jobs, Eva reinvented herself once again. She went to the then-Soviet Union to study Russian and became a journalist. Over time, she went on to interview figures like Robert Redford, Harrison Ford, and Liza Minnelli for magazines like Cosmopolitan. “She worked in Europe, in Cuba; she even took photos of Fidel Castro,” says Nailea.
By then, Eva was close friends with artists and public figures in her circle, such as José Luis Cuevas, Juan José Gurrola, and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Her social circle also included secretaries of the interior and directors like Milos Forman and Peter Greenaway.
Growing Up with Eva Norvind
Nailea was five years old when she discovered yoga, a practice she still follows today. “I’d come home from school and find a Canadian man living in our house in the living room. I loved it. He was always doing headstands or sitting in the lotus position, and his hair reached down to his waist.”
“We lived in Altavista, in an apartment where all kinds of people came and went: her artist friends, foreign and Mexican politicians, folk musicians, and people from all walks of life,” she recalls. “Then we moved to Chimalistac, where Elena Poniatowska now lives, next to a church. It was very nice,” she recalls.
Nailea, on the other hand, describes herself as a loner, quite unlike Eva, whose outgoing nature seemed to constantly attract eccentric characters.
“My mother embodied a spirit of exploration and freedom; she was very impulsive in some ways, but she was never addicted to drugs, and alcohol never appealed to her. Although, back in the ’70s, she certainly tried everything there was to explore.” As a child, Nailea accompanied her mother to the home of the Oaxacan priestess María Sabina, along with Dr. Salvador Roquet, a therapist and pioneering researcher in the use of psychedelic plants.
Remembering Eva in Everyday Life
Her fondest memory isn’t of her mother’s wild parties or the “dungeons” she would later have at home. “One of my earliest memories of her is watching her eat apples—they were her favorite, and she’d eat pounds and pounds of them,” she recalls. “She never cooked for me; I learned to cook on my own. She liked Norwegian waffles, but she didn’t know how to make them.”
But perhaps the memory that sticks with me the most is “seeing my mom playing the guitar and singing to me. That’s how I remember her most.”
Nailea’s Other Life
“My mother was a highly sexual and open-minded person. In New York, she found the world that would eventually lead her to become a dominatrix.” Nailea’s life takes another turn when Eva moves back to the United States to study film and decides that her daughter should stay in Mexico City.
“It wasn’t as if she was the only one in charge, and I often stood up for myself. I even went so far as to say things like, ‘I’m not your slave.’ Because sometimes she found it all too easy to give orders,” she recalls.
She was nine years old when Nailea left Mexico to join her mother. “I wanted to be with her, and in the end she arranged everything so I could go live there.” The two of them settled into the Wellington Hotel in downtown New York. Unfortunately, their new home had nothing in common with the apple orchards, the afternoons in Tepoztlán, or the warm days in Mexico City. The city was hostile, made of concrete, with its skyscrapers and extreme weather. There, while she studied and tried to make her way, Eva began to rebuild herself, creating a new version of who she was. Nailea didn’t like the city. Living with her mother became challenging, because she was already a different person.
“I grew up in survival mode saying ‘‘I can handle this,’ with things that were out of the ordinary; throughout my life, I’ve always had the attitude of not playing the victim ”Nailea Norvind
Three years later, she confessed to Eva that she wanted to return to Mexico City: “She told me she couldn’t go back with me, that she was halfway through her degree and had a business to run. But that she wouldn’t stop me if I wanted to leave.” At the age of twelve, Nailea returned to Mexico alone and moved into a room rented to her by a family in Coyoacán.
From that age on, Nailea was already driving a car with a fake driver’s license. “My mom was an expert at forging documents,” she recalls. Despite her maturity, the experience of independence wasn’t easy. One of the daughters-in-law in the family she lived with was a kleptomaniac: “She left me with so little money that sometimes I could only afford a single roll.”
Her teenage years in Mexico City turned into a whirlwind of theater and television appearances. “I used to send my mom magazine clippings of myself, and she always told me how proud she was,” she recalls.
From the ages of 14 to 16, Nailea lived in Tizapán, San Ángel, with her grandmother; she then moved to the mountains, to a community in Tlalpuente, in the State of Mexico. Her grandmother never left Mexico, and Nailea cared for her until the end.
Eva would never return to live in Mexico. “She would visit me, or I would go see her; she would send me money for my school tuition, but that was it,” Nailea recalls. “We did stay in touch, though sometimes there were distances or boundaries between us. In the mother-daughter relationship we had, there was never a time when we didn’t know how the other was doing.”
The Allure of the Dominatrix: Performance, Provocation, and Healing
From New York, in order to maintain her luxurious lifestyle, support her daughter, and pay for her education, Eva was building a career as a dominatrix. She worked at a place called Belle de Jour —like the Luis Buñuel film starring Catherine Deneuve. “From afar, I could sense how she was changing, but I loved her all the same. Eva always taught me to accept everyone for who they are and what they want to do, as long as it doesn’t affect you.”
“Her friends also became much more eccentric, because she was always talking about sex,” Nailea recalls. “I didn’t understand why adults cared so much about that.”
Most of Eva Norvind’s clients were powerful figures who wanted to feel submissive, dominated, and humiliated. Among those who attended the sessions were men from the CIA and the FBI, as well as some famous figures whom Eva kept anonymous out of professional ethics.
“The joy she felt as a dominatrix stemmed from the fact that she loved to provoke people,” says Nailea. “She liked to elicit a reaction to what she did, and she could be loved or hated for that honesty.”
Although her mother tried to be discreet about her new passion, Nailea eventually caught on. Living in such a small apartment, it was hard to hide. To this day, she remembers those places where the domination sessions took place: “There was a set with torture instruments and themed areas. They were beautiful rooms, with velvet. Fetishists love silk, leather, and fur. She used whips, boots, and nipple clamps that she put on her clients and then ripped off; she also made them wear masks. There was a room where they reenacted a crucifixion.”
But in Mexico, her work as a dominatrix didn’t have as much of an impact as it did in New York’s vibrant BDSM scene—or at least it’s something she kept under wraps. Nailea never followed in her mother’s footsteps. Perhaps the closest she ever came was when she modeled fetish clothing in the 1980s; that was as close as she ever got to the sadomasochistic world.
“Some of her friends would ask her if I was a dominatrix too, but I always made it very clear that that was her thing. There are certainly many ways in which I’m just like her—or maybe it’s just that I understand her better and better—but I have my own explorations. Over time, we come to understand our parents, and today I agree with her on many things, but there are also others where you decide the opposite,” she reflects. “Later on, when life gets complicated, you either get stuck or do the best you can with what you have.”
For Nailea, her mother’s sex work had a healing purpose that went beyond the business: “The spirit is connected to sex, to help couples grow and expand their lives together.” Over time, Eva would explore that erotic side further, earning a master’s degree in human sexuality, studying forensic psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and becoming a psychosexual therapist—sometimes under the alias Ava Taurel, after the Taurus of her zodiac sign— as well as a sex coach in Hollywood.
One of his most notable projects was the film *The Thomas Crown Affair*, in which he worked with actress Rene Russo, who—due to a history of family and religious repression—was unable to fully express her sexuality on screen.
During an interview in 2001, Nailea confessed that all the Norvinds had always been bisexual. One of her daughters called her right away when they started asking her about it: “Mom, why are you saying that if you’ve never been with another woman?” she asked. “I told her no, but that I could.” Eva never denied her romances with other women or having been the lover of many figures of the time. She was simply free.
A week later, I ran into Nailea again during the photo shoot we did with her in Mexico City. She arrived on roller skates, sporting a California-style look that suited her perfectly. The shoot takes place the day before what would have been her mother’s birthday: “She would have turned 82; it’s hard to imagine her.”
The Last Days of Eva Norvind
Zipolite, in Oaxaca, is known in many Zapotec legends as the “beach of the dead.” Its powerful waves are considered among the most dangerous in the world. On May 16, 2006, Nailea was filming outdoor scenes for the soap opera Rebelde. Something serious must have happened because the production crew didn’t pick her up in their van.
Then, producer Pedro Damián came over and told her he had something important to tell her. He took her for a walk to a secluded spot near the filming locations. “He told me my mother had been in an accident, and my first thought was that it had been a car accident.”
The tragedy had occurred at 1:00 p.m. on May 14. But since instant communication didn’t exist back then, a relative from the hotel where her mother was staying took a bus that very night and arrived in Mexico City the next day. Not knowing how to contact Nailea directly, she decided to go to the Televisa headquarters and ask to speak with “the artist, the one on TV.”
There’s a scene in a Xavier Dolan film where a cascade of icy water falls from the sky and soaks the main character. He uses that image to describe how he felt when he learned of his mother’s death—she had drowned at sea.
Despite the emotional toll, Nailea remained steadfast and decided to film her remaining scenes before catching a flight to Oaxaca. In the scenes, the protagonist was meeting her mother for the first time: “I was losing my mother, and she was finding hers.”
“I had been with her on her birthday a week earlier, and then she told me she was going on vacation. She always traveled alone because she loved the nudist beach; she liked to go there to write and read.” The official cause of death was cardiac arrest, although the death certificate lists it as a violent death.
“It was one force of nature clashing with another,” Nailea reflects. Eva was at Playa del Amor, a small cove in the area, when the waves slammed her against the rocks. “She might have been reckless in many ways, but not in this. She had just had surgery and physically wasn’t in any condition to fight the current.” A surfer managed to pull her body out of the water.
In that area, they say the sea swallows people up and rarely gives them back. “I’m grateful I got to see her, because someone could have told me that Eva didn’t die, that she simply left to start a new life, and I would have believed it. My mom was always reinventing herself. If she hadn’t physically appeared, I would never have known if she really died.”
Nailea arrived in Oaxaca very late and spent the night in the room where her mother had spent her final days. “It was very touching to see what was in the trash: the leftover apple cores from what she’d eaten that day and a few small bags of almonds,” she recalls.
Very early in the morning, she went to what was, literally, a shack serving as a morgue: a small, rustic structure by the sea, permeated with the smell of formaldehyde and detergent, where Eva’s body had been opened to drain the water out. “They had sewn the body up with ropes,” says Nailea. The next day she held a mass for her at sea, a ritual she continues to repeat every year when she travels to the same beach: “I go to talk to her, at the place where it all happened.”
Back in 2025, the actress had a dangerous experience on a beach in Oaxaca as well: “What happened to me, I think, is exactly what she went through. I sat down in the sand and let the water wash over me. I wasn’t swimming; I was just sitting there, letting the waves roll over me. Suddenly, a stronger one came. I was at the water’s edge, but the force of the ocean started pulling me in, and I could barely get out.”
For Nailea, it wasn’t a coincidence: “No one goes through the same thing as their own mother, but I feel like she’s part of it all and that she’s been watching over me.” She often dreams about her. There isn’t a recurring dream, but her presence is so tangible that she’s woken up thinking she was right there beside her.
“It was really wonderful that we got together before I left because she wanted to show me her documentary *Born Without*, about the Mexican artist with a disability, José Flores.”
The film was completed in 2007 by Nailea herself. It won three awards at international film festivals and was screened at the Venice Film Festival and many others. “Finishing her work was one of the best periods of my life, because I felt she was still teaching me life lessons.”
“Sure, we had our moments when we argued, but it was always in the heat of the moment, and we left it at that. She always used to say, ‘You need someone to have a good fight with,’ but we never had a big reconciliation hanging over us.”
Night is falling in Tepoztlán, the town famous for its pyramid atop the mountain and its alleged UFO sightings. Through the window—which Nailea has closed because her cats escape and tend to disappear for periods of time—she points to a leafy tree and reflects: “Everything is always changing, and we are never just ourselves; our individuality is always connected to something else.”
Credits: Special thanks to: Luis Sánchez “Astro”. Nailea Norvind’s outfit on the cover: Adolfo Domínguez. Hair and makeup: Carla Paola García. Photos of Nailea Norvind: José Carlos Martínez. Stylist: Ruth Buendía. Stylist Assistant: Victor Manuel Portillo M. Art Director: Claudia Fernández. Edited and interviewed by Alejandro Mancilla. Editor-in-Chief of AW Magazine: Urbano Hidalgo.
