Joan Stuart Ross was born in Boston and has lived and worked in Seattle, WA
since 1968. A painter and printmaker, Joan was the first teacher of Monotype in Seattle. She graduated from Boston Girls Latin School, earned a BA from Connecticut College, and did graduate study in Printmaking and studied Color Theory with Josef Albers at Yale. Joan earned an MA and MFA from the University of Iowa, where she studied with Ludins and Lasansky. Joan has exhibited her art nationally and internationally in over 30 solo and 200 group exhibits. She has had artist residencies at Centrum, Pilchuck, Espy, and Playa, as well as in Paris and Norway. Joan is also a published poet.
Among many awards, Joan received Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Memorial Award, a Rome Fellowship from the Northwest Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in Italy, the Kathe Kollwitz Award from the Northwest Caucus for Art for her advocacy of women artists, a 4Culture Individual Artists Project Award and a Fulbright-Hays Grant to Vietnam.
Recent exhibitions include solo shows at the University of Puget Sound and the Patricia Cameron Gallery. From 1994-1997 Joan led the design team for the artwork in the Jury Waiting Rooms at the King County Regional Justice Center in Kent, WA. Joan’s artwork has been featured in Fifty Northwest Artists, Northwest Originals, and Contemporary Printmaking in the Northwest.
Joan is a founding board member of Seattle Print Arts and a charter member of
Print Arts Northwest. She was a tenured professor in Fine Arts at North Seattle Community College from 1996-2009. Joan’s work is represented in Seattle at the Patricia Cameron Gallery and the Seattle Art Museum Gallery; in Friday Harbor at Waterworks Gallery; in Astoria, OR at RiverSea Gallery and in Portland, OR at Print Arts Northwest. She maintains her studios at BallardWorks in Seattle and in Nahcotta, WA.
Joan’s poetry has been published on METRO busses, in 4Culture’s “Written Arts,” “Switched-on Gutenberg” and other periodicals. Her poem, Vapor, won an award in Richard Hugo House’s 1998 “Power of Place”
Competition, and Access Code won an Honorable Mention in the 2001 Washington Poets Association Stafford Poetry Contest. Joan is a charter member of the Village Idioms.
