Joan Snyder is an American painter from New York. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. After graduating from Douglass College in 1962, Snyder received her MFA from Rutgers University in 1966. In the mid to late 60’s she was working explicitly with the idea of female sensibility. She gained public attention in the early 1970s with her gestural stroke paintings which deconstructed the story of abstract painting. Often referred to as an autobiographical or confessional artist, Snyder’s paintings are narratives of both personal and communal experiences. She is a self-proclaimed feminist and creates work in the vain of abstract expressionism because of how that genre of painting is over dominated by male artists.