Joan Morris has been making shaped-resist dyed textiles for more than thirty-five years. Her textile works of art are in the permanent collections of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Museum of art at RISD and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, among others. She has taught shaped-resist dyeing to children in New England, and to adults in the United States, Canada and Europe. Joan’s career as a master-dyer for theatre has spanned more than thirty years. She has worked in the Department of Theatre at Dartmouth College since 1985, creating the textiles for over 100 productions there. In 1996 she designed the shaped-resist textiles for the Broadway production of The Lion King, and has been fabricating them for Lion King worldwide since then. She and fellow artist Michele Ratté developed and patented a permanent textile printing process that allows for a washable deposition of precious metals on fabric. Her current studio practice merges shaped-resist dyeing with printmaking.
