Iona Rozeal Brown was born in 1966, Washington, DC and currently live and works in New York City.
She did not begin painting until her twenties. She attended the Pratt Institute, (Brooklyn, NY) then went on to get a BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2002, she received her MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven.
Brown had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami, San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C and received her first solo museum exhibition in 2010 at MOCA Cleveland.
Iona Rozeal Brown’s large-scale acrylic paintings comments on the ever-changing essence of cultural identity. Her work creates visual mash-ups of two disparate but in fact subtly harmonious subcultures: the samurai and geishas depicted in traditional Japanese printmaking and the contemporary world of hip-hop.
Trained in the art of ukiyo-e printmaking, Brown pursues a transcultural aesthetic in both her imagery and her technique, mixing the racial, gender, and class issues in her subject matter.
