Nadja was born in 1955 in Alexandria, Egypt, to a Russian painter mother and a Lebanese doctor father. Her childhood in Lebanon and the Paris region is not ordinary: no school except correspondence courses until the age of 13, and especially stories told and drawn by her mother, Olga Lecaye.

In 1989, she won the Totem prize at the Montreuil Youth Book Fair with Blue Dog, an album of fawns with gouaches. Many more albums would follow, which innovate an expressionist style in her full-page paintings. Nadja also enjoys making books with her son, Raphaël Fejtö, and her brother, Grégoire Solotareff. Together, they make parodies of famous tales. Nadja has also published albums and stories in the Mouche collection (the famous Momo series) for both the young and old.

For adults, she also wrote graphic novels, “How to make children's books”, “The ones I did not smoke” (Cornelius) or “The liar” (Denoël Graphic).  It brings together readers, young and old, by recounting (in the Mouche collection), through the ulterior voice of her inspiring fairies, finite stories, literary stories and stories for all, a bit like a ballad. A ballad of happy people wearing dark glasses and well spoken, heady and friendly, demanding but also terribly encouraging.

Nadja lives in Paris where she divides her time between painting and illustration