Joanna Kaufman is a visual artist and writer. Her paintings, illustrations, and written work find form in books, as prints on paper and original works for exhibition and by commission. In her visual art, Joanna works primarily with watercolor and gouache paints. An enduring interest in her work is with insects, especially moths, bees, beetles and cicadas. Joanna has worked as a teacher of second-language acquisition and art to children and adults in the United States and abroad and has collaborated on text-image projects including illustration of thirteen story books. Her paintings are held in public collections of the City of Portland, Oregon, and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Joanna studied Spanish and education at Northern Arizona University and creative writing at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Willamette University, where she received an MFA in 2021. She lives in Trout Lake, Washington, at the base of an active stratovolcano and near the site of a village called Cranes’ Place, for sandhill cranes which nested in wetlands historically part of the Yakama and Cowlitz homelands.