Artist and Storyteller

Joy Marie Curtis is a multidisciplinary artist and storyteller working across photography, historical portraiture, poetry, and short fiction. Her work emerges from a lifelong curiosity about the forces that shape human experience—science and history, mythology and theology, geography and culture, and the mysterious places where seemingly opposite ideas meet.

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For Joy, art is a language beyond conversation. Ideas may begin in discussion, research, and observation, but art allows her to move beyond explanation and into emotion—to give form to the questions, feelings, and experiences that words alone cannot always contain.

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The landscapes of the American Southwest and her international travels have profoundly shaped her creative vision. Joy sees geography not as a backdrop to human history, but as one of its authors. Mountains, deserts, rivers, and natural boundaries influence how people survive, imagine, worship, and tell stories. Within mythology, theology, and legend, she finds that the geography of a homeland is often woven deeply into the stories people create to understand their place within the natural world.

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Her work frequently explores the relationship between difference and connection. Joy is drawn to apparent opposites and the unexpected places where they overlap—not by erasing what makes them different, but by honoring those differences. She explores how mythology may illuminate theology, how science complements poetry.

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Joy's artwork has been featured in the TERRAIN 15 Main Event in Washington. Her work Navajo Daily Living is held in a private collection in Spanish Fork, Utah, and her artwork received recognition at the 2025 Art City Days. Through her visual art and writing, Joy Marie Curtis continues to explore the landscapes, histories, ideas, and stories that shape both individual identity and the larger human experience.