Tonia was born and raised in Illinois and now lives in Denver with her husband and two young sons. She received her BFA from Illinois State University in 2001, and earned her MFA from the University of Alberta in Canada in 2005, where she began creating images through the repetition of a simple mark.

Tonia exhibits her work nationally and internationally. She has been an Artist In Residence at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village, CO, as well as her 2007 studio residency at Women’s Studio Workshop, where she had interned in 2001. In 2010, Tonia spoke on the panel Printmaking and the Mundane at the College Art Association Conference in Chicago, and has been a visiting artist at the University of Denver and Fort Hays State University, Kansas. In 2014, Tonia was a resident artist in the Drawing Studio – an interactive studio exhibition – at the Denver Art Museum. In 2016, she was honored to show a series of her drawings in an exhibition titled Colorado Women in Abstraction. She works both in her home studio and at Red Delicious Press, a  community printmaking studio in Aurora, CO. She continues to explore the dynamic effects of small, simple marks massing together to form a complex whole.

Images (left to right below):

Emerge from Black 4; Emerge from Black 5; Unnatural Boundaries 3; Unnatural Boundaries 4.