Xandra van Rossem was born in the seventies in a small town named Eemnes, growing up in a musical family. Her father is a renowned jazz musician and art painter. Her mother is a classically trained opera singer. Xandra regularly performed with her father’s jazz combo and made her first public debut at the age of fourteen on the stage of the Amersfoort jazz festival. She studied at the Hilversum Conservatory and took singing lessons from her mother. In 1988 she entered the art school, graduated, and worked as a goldsmith in Amsterdam Diamond City. In the late 1990s, she followed courses to be a graphic designer and labored for publishers of various magazines, photo retouching, and publicity.
In 2013, Xandra started by photographing the streets on her initiative to understand the life course of self-knowledge by making documentary photography in Amsterdam-Centrum and De Wallen. As a reminder of her youth in the eighties being a part of the heroin epidemic, a project is created on the Dutch drug culture and tourism, followed by an exhibition in Pakhuis de Zwijger in which she exposes the taboo with controversial images of how the heroin epidemic started in the 1970s.
The images express an interest in philosophy, the life course to self-knowledge where she explores the motive of the human mind through personal projects which intertwine a common thread of her life, Advaita Vedanta philosophy, and esoteric teachings.
