Eileen Lyons

Eileen Lyons is a South Florida–based artist whose work examines the shifting boundaries between land and water as sites of both permanence and transformation. Influenced by her early work as a cartographer for the U.S. Department of Defense in Germany, she approaches painting by mapping aerial perspective and uses a cartographic language to explore coastlines, islands, and peninsulas shaped by tides, erosion, storms, and human presence. Her work reflects the continuous negotiation between natural and human-built borders. She uses these evolving edges as reminders of change, endurance and the shaping of self.

Lyons earned a BFA from Saint Mary’s College of Notre Dame, an MA in Visual Arts from American University and teaching certification from the University of Virginia. She has served as a Teaching Artist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. She is currently a painting instructor at Lighthouse ArtCenter in Tequesta, Florida.

Lyons has been awarded numerous residencies including Cill Rialaig Art Centre in Ireland; Tides Institute & Museum of Art in Eastport, Maine; Mackinac Island State Park, Michigan; and two upcoming residencies at the Good Hart Foundation, Michigan and Vashon Island, Seattle. Lyons has two commissioned permanent installations in Washington, DC, and her widely exhibited work is also held in private and corporate collections throughout the United States, Canada, and Ireland.