MARSHA CONNELL was nurtured in her love for art, for nature, and for learning by her grandfather, Samuel Riss, Renaissance farmer and watercolor painter in Cobleskill, New York. Born in Brooklyn, she grew up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania and then Gloversville, New York, where she moved with her mother and younger brother after the death of her father, Irving Goldstein. She excelled in an academic public school education, but in college, she was free to focus on art, a semester at Syracuse University, then at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, graduating in 1967 with a fine arts degree in drawing and painting. Her most influential teachers there were recent Yale graduates: Arnold Bittleman, Robert Reed, and Arthur Anderson. They taught a grounding in classical and modern forms coupled with a contemporary search for personal vision and voice and one's own process.

Connell moved to Connecticut and then to Pennsylvania for several years, drawing, painting, working in clay, and teaching in college and private school. She was mentored by Japanese-American painter Maya Schock, founder of Doshi Gallery and Art Center in Harrisburg. In 1974 she moved to Santa Rosa, in northern California, with her family, husband Jerry Connell and children Sam and Reba, where she resides today.

Living at the Pacific Rim, the parameters of her art expanded to explore meeting places of East and West, in painting, sculpture, and collage, as well as installation and performance. She completed graduate work in sculpture with Steve DeStaebler at San Francisco State University in 1978 and has participated in almost 200 exhibitions in galleries, colleges, alternative spaces and small museums, especially in California and the East Coast. Her recent work follows two major directions: 1) a narrative series of collage/prints, and 2) expressive landscape paintings.

Connell is presently an adjunct instructor in the art department at Santa Rosa Junior College. Recipient of several California Arts Council grants and a Fellow of the California Arts Project, she has conducted artist in residence projects in elementary and high schools and facilitates trainings for teachers. She also leads creative process workshops and private sessions. Discussing her teaching, Connell states, "early in my career I discovered and developed a more holistic mode of teaching, which we have come to call expressive and healing arts. I often describe my approach as a bridge between the worlds of studio art and expressive arts therapy. Doing this work with compassion, empathy, and a personal identification with the experiences of the artist/participant, I have been privileged to accompany and witness profoundly healing journeys of the spirit through the arts. My belief in the power of the work has been strengthened by my own spiritual healing through making collages I call Dream Vessels, as well as through painting in nature, responding to the spirit of place."

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