"I use my art and writing as a tool for social change."

As a little girl growing up in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, Shawn Dell Joyce was inspired by the immigrants working the verdant Texas landscape. She works mainly in pastel, using only her hands, and humbly refers to it as “advanced finger painting.”  She uses complementary color pairs for her paintings, giving them a sense of color harmony. She arrived in New York by way of the San Francisco Art Institute. At twenty-five her work was collected by the Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Georges Pompidou as part of a collection of East Village artists. She showed extensively in the booming East village arts scene, and SoHo section of Manhattan. Her love of the landscape brought her north to Orange County, New York, where she currently resides and teaches workshops in landscape painting and creates “sustainable art”  She has won many prestigious awards for her work such as the “People's Choice” Award at the International Plein Air Paint Out in Niagara Falls, Canada. She has been featured in many national newspapers and magazines like the New York Times and Mothering Magazine. She is a signature member of New York Plein Air Painters (NYPAP), and founder of Orange County Plein Air Painters (OCPAP), and the Wallkill River School. She trained with Al Gore and leading scientists from the Climate Institute around climate change. She has a weekly column called "Sustainable Living" in the Times Herald Record, and a periodic column called "Locally Grown" in the Wallkill Valley Times.