LaShonda Cooks is a Dallas-based artist and writer who loves exploring cultural norms, identity and beauty through words and images. Her work blends fairytales, household names and concepts into galaxies beyond their normal reach. She believes the world is her canvas and thoroughly enjoys transforming ordinary materials into art and finding magic in the mundane. Cooks’ work is a love song to self, family, community and culture. Her work smells like homemade cookies--warm, comforting, nostalgic and nurturing with a slight hint of spice—leaving space for the surprise of the unexpected. Her work sounds like jazz on a rainy day--the sleepy and sometimes chaotic pitter-patter of paint falls with tiny drops and long strokes intermittently woven to conjure a final image that is wholly her own yet nods to the impressionist masters of the past. She uses layers of vibrant colors with blue as her favorite leading lady to create strokes to store movement and memory in each creation. Cooks received her BS from Babson College in 2010. While there 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 and evolve over time. She loves playing with scale and has created paintings ranging from a few inches tall to covering entire walls on materials spanning bamboo plates, traditional canvas, handheld mirrors, wood and fabric to tell a story embedded with its own unique space and time in each item. 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, 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 inventive workshops for all ages. She is a 2026, 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. Cooks was named a 2025 Rising Star by the Oak Cliff Fine Arts Society and 2025 Recipient of the Small Black Museum Stipend from the Carver Museum in Austin, Texas.