Lauren Mills
Cell: 413-695-4064
Biography
Lauren Mills was born in 1957 and grew up in Connecticut, Oregon, and Minnesota. She studied art, literature, and psychology at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota and painting and sculpture at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts in Connecticut. She received a BA in Art from the University of California at Santa Barbara and Master’s degree in Book Illustration from San Jose State University. Lauren has illustrated such children’s classics, as At the Back of the North Wind, Anne of Green Gables and Thumbelina. The Rag Coat was her first original story. It received the Charlotte Award, thirteen state awards, has been told over the radio, and has been performed as a ballet and a play. Fairy Wings, written by Lauren, and co-illustrated with her former husband Dennis Nolan, won the SCBWI Golden Kite Award. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the country, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
The New York Times described her watercolors as “alluring… Whistlerian to the point of Pre-Raphaelitism.” Lauren has taught at the Paier College of Art and at the Lyme Academy of Fine Art, both in Connecticut and privately in Massachusetts. In 1991 Mills also became interested in sculpture and has recently received national acclaim for her portraiture work, including the Gold Medal from the Allied Artists of America 2006, the Merit Award of Excellence from the Portrait Society of America and the American Women Artists in 2008, and a finalist in both The National Sculpture Society and the ARC International Salon, 2007 and 2009. Her sculpture, “Legacy”, depicting a grandmother and child dancing, was installed at the Heritage Park in Lake Winona, Indiana in 2008. Lauren Mills also works as a portrait painter.