Donna Isham

"I see my work as part of a larger conversation about perception, transformation, and the emotional landscapes we all move through." — Donna Isham

Donna Isham is a Los Angeles–based contemporary expressionist artist whose original paintings move fluidly between abstraction and figuration. Exploring transcendence, resilience, and the boundary between perception and reality, her large-scale contemporary paintings are defined by bold color, gestural mark-making, and layered symbolism — figures emerge and dissolve into expressive marks, evoking a space between the material and the spiritual. For Isham, abstraction is not an escape from reality but a way of distilling its emotional truth.

Her expressive language extends beyond the canvas in the Alchemy Immersive Collection, an ongoing collaboration with her husband, Emmy and Grammy Award–winning composer Mark Isham. This immersive art series pairs Donna's paintings with original scores and projection-mapped animation, creating multisensory installations where color, light, motion, and sound unfold as a unified whole.

Painting within a lineage of women artists including Berthe Morisot, Elaine de Kooning, and Cecily Brown, Isham's voice remains distinctly her own — contemporary, emotionally direct, and visually powerful. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including Context Art Miami, Intersect Aspen, and Felix Art Fair, is held in private and corporate art collections, and has been featured in Flaunt, Whitehot Magazine, The Miami Herald, and Artsy — attracting contemporary art collectors drawn to work that is visually compelling and deeply human.