Denise Shaw: Mixed-Media Artist on Human Rights, Anima Mundi, and the Minab School Girl

Key facts

• Denise Shaw is a New York City-based mixed-media artist working from studios in Tribeca and Connecticut.
• Her practice addresses global social narratives, human rights, and the philosophical concept of Anima Mundi, the "Soul of the World."
• She uses acrylic, watercolor, photo transfers, metal leaf, pumice, and sand in her layered works.
• Her exhibitions include the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., the Reece Museum in Tennessee, The Copelouzos Family Museum in Athens, Greece, and the Human Rights Biennial in Seattle and California.
• In New York City, her work has been shown at the Museum of Arts and Design, the Swiss Institute, the Park Avenue Armory, LaGuardia College, and the Viridian Gallery.
• In 2003, she designed and painted the White House Easter Egg commemorating the 9/11 attacks.
• Her painting "Minab School Girl" responds to the February 28, 2026 bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, which she says killed 156 people, including 120 students and 26 teachers.
• The painting's dress design references a seventeenth-century Isfahan tile pattern, rendered in fluorescent acrylic against a gold metal leaf background.
• Shaw holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and a postgraduate certificate in Film from New York University, and also attended The New School.
• A Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art inspired her to begin a painting about the Strait of Hormuz, currently in progress.