Heather Layton is a multidisciplinary artist and educator with a creative practice that weaves making, teaching and international art diplomacy. Her work, inspired by her ongoing effort to develop an aesthetics of kindness, has been exhibited nationally in spaces including MoCA L.I. (the Museum of Contemporary Art Long Island), Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center (Buffalo, NY), Hamden Gallery at UMass Amherst (Amherst, MA) and Buffalo Art Studios (Buffalo, NY). Internationally, she represented the United States at the Port Izmir 3 Contemporary Art Triennial in Izmir, Turkey, and has been an artist in residence in countries including South Korea, Slovakia, India, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Layton received an MFA in Painting from the State University of New York, New Paltz in 2003 and currently works as a senior lecturer of art at the University of Rochester. She has hosted many International Visitor Leadership Program cohorts at her home in the United States, including IVLP alumni from Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uruguay, Ethiopia, Poland, and Palestine. Layton is also engaged in community art, creating collaborative projects such as "Painting for Health", a visual book that helped medical doctors and refugees communicate despite language barriers. Recently, PBS aired an episode about her work which can be viewed here:
https://www.pbs.org/video/aha-627-story-based-art-heather-layton-8x6jvy/. Despite all of the bad news in the world, she remains stubbornly optimistic.