Joanna Kaufman is a visual artist and writer. Her paintings, illustrations, and written works find form in books, as prints on paper, and as original works for exhibition and by commission. In her visual art, Joanna works primarily with water media. An enduring interest in her work is with insects, especially bees, beetles, moths, and butterflies. Joanna has worked as a teacher of second-language acquisition, and of art, to children and adult learners. She has collaborated on text-image projects including illustration of thirteen story books. Joanna’s paintings are held in public collections of the City of Portland, Oregon, and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Joanna completed undergraduate studies in education and Spanish language at Northern Arizona University and received a MFA in creative writing from Pacific Northwest College of Art, Willamette University. She lives in Washington state, at the base of an active stratovolcano and near the site of a village called Cranes’ Place, for sandhill cranes which nested in nearby wetlands historically traced by ancestors of the Yakama, Klickitat, Wishram, Wasco, and Cascade people.