Joan Snyder (b. 1940) is a MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow widely recognized as a leading American contemporary painter and printmaker. She earned her BA from Douglass College and her MFA from Rutgers. The signature style that Snyder has developed over the past 40 years is characterized by gestural, patchy brushwork and vivid color combinations as well as incorporating unconventional materials into her paint, such as silk, burlap, seeds, twigs, dirt, and glitter. Her breakthrough works were the ‘stroke’ paintings she created in the late 1960s which were in opposition to the male-dominated abstract movements of Minimalism and Color Field painting. Snyder used autobiographical elements and feminist ideas as the basis of many of her works. The impact she has had on abstract art and materialistic exploration of painting has brought her widespread critical attention and institutional recognition. Snyder’s works have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, and the Guggenheim, all in New York, as well as the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Phillips Collections in Washington, DC.