LaShonda Cooks is a Dallas-based artist and writer who loves exploring cultural norms, identity and beauty through words and images.  She believes the world is her canvas and thoroughly enjoys transforming ordinary materials into art and finding magic in the mundane.  Her work is a love song to self, family, community and culture.

She received her BS from Babson College in 2010.  While there Cooks, the daughter of an art teacher, balanced her business education with her life-long interest in the arts.  She volunteered in the college's ceramic studio in exchange for unlimited access to explore painting on ceramic tiles. 

 

Those color studies helped her develop a signature painting style that uses fluid strokes and layers of color to render figures that she continues to refine today. She loves playing with scale and has created paintings ranging from a few inches tall to covering entire walls on materials spanning traditional canvas, wood, household objects and digital designs. 

 

Capturing the lights and darks and shadows of a broad spectrum of humanity including her own helps Cooks understand what makes us all tick and allows her to explore and embody the energy beneath the surface in her creations. She uses layers of vibrant colors in a mix of pointillistic and impressionist strokes to store movement and memory in her work.

Her art has been featured in the Dallas Mayor's Office, Forest Theater, St. Matthews Cathedral's Sundermann Gallery, Deep Ellum’s Blues Alley, African American Museum of Dallas, Sundance Square, MUCE Miami Campus, Babson College, Beacon Gallery, Boston City Hall, 440 Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, Illamar Galeria in Peru and the Chateau D’Orquevaux Residency in France. 

 

Inspired by her ceramic studio time in college, over the past decade Cooks has partnered with local cultural centers to increase access to the arts by creating and hosting innovative workshops for all ages.  She is a 2025, 2020 and 2018 recipient of City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture grants. 

She is thrilled to be a 2025 Carter Community Artist for the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth and honored to be an inaugural 2024-2025 Dallas Museum of Art Junior Associates McDermott Fellow.  

 

Her work is part of the Bass Family Art Collection, Chateau d'Orquevaux International Artists & Writers Collection, Grace Cook Collection, Jennifer Cowley Collection, Valerie and Emmanuel Gillespie Collection, Vanessa Meshack Collection, Msani Hous Collection and is a growing part of private and public collections across the world.