BIO

Donna Isham is a contemporary expressionist artist whose work spans painting, sculpture, and immersive installation, exploring the emotional and psychological terrain of the human experience. Working fluidly between abstraction and figuration, her practice centers on themes of transcendence, resilience, and the fragile boundary between perception and reality. Through bold color, gestural mark-making, and layered symbolism, Isham creates evocative visual narratives that suggest spirituality, personal transformation, and the metaphysical dimensions of lived experience.

Expressive immediacy is central to Isham’s process. Color, gesture, and line move fluidly across the surface, capturing moments of perception before they resolve into fixed form. Rather than refining away these gestures, she preserves them as evidence of the physical and emotional act of painting itself. For Isham, abstraction is not an escape from reality but a way of distilling its emotional truth. Figures emerge and dissolve into expressive marks, while recurring motifs—including the female form, fragmented bodies, shifting light, and geometric structures—evoke a liminal space between the material and the spiritual worlds.

Raised in Los Angeles, Isham began drawing and painting at the age of four. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, she expanded her creative practice into film, costume design, and styling. This cinematic sensibility would later inform a new dimension of her artistic practice: The Alchemy Immersive Collection, developed in collaboration with her husband, acclaimed composer Mark Isham.

The Alchemy Immersive Collection expands the language of painting into an original multi-sensory installation practice that merges abstraction, moving image, and sound. Created in collaboration with Mark Isham—an Emmy and Grammy Award–winning musician and Academy Award–nominated film composer and musician—the series integrates large-scale paintings with projection-mapped animation and original musical scores. Blending traditional painting with digital media, these works explore perception, transformation, and the porous boundary between the physical and imagined worlds. Through the interplay of color, light, motion, and sound, the collaborators create immersive environments that invite viewers into shifting psychological landscapes and contemplative emotional spaces.