JoAnne Castelli-Castor was born into a family of artists and has been drawing and painting since she was a teenager. She has recently traced her heritage back to 1507 and the ceramic artisans of the town of Castelli in Italy. She works in her New Jersey studio on portraits and other commissioned projects.

 

A major part of her work is a group of paintings she calls "Global Emergence of the Feminine Energy". Symbolic female figures rising from water, earth, darkness, clouds, etc. are used as icons of world conflicts and are representative of a society which is struggling to move toward consensus and peace and away from aggression and war. Her works are large-scale and can be described as realistic yet abstract graphic compositions that use the female figure as an element of the landscape.