Heather Hanson | Artist. Writer. Speaker

i have lived so many lives inside this one.

I am not one thing.

I am not finished.

I am not arriving.

i am here.

the long way back

I grew up the kid who was always drawing. The one everyone called "the artist" — before I learned that art wasn't practical, wasn't safe, wasn't a way to make a living.

So I pushed it down and went looking for who I was without it.

What followed was a full life. The Navy — helicopter mechanic, then Russian linguist. Corporate America, all the way to Global VP. Raising triplets. Traveling continents. Achieving everything on the outside while my creativity sat untouched on a shelf — literally. Mountains of paints and brushes, beautifully organized, never opened.

In October 2016, I was diagnosed with stage 2B breast cancer. Cancer stripped everything — my body, my identity, my excuses. I started painting at 3am after chemo, praying, crying, desperate to know who I was. That was the beginning of the return.

I left corporate life in January 2020. Opened a studio and gallery in Asheville, North Carolina — a space where people would walk in, breathe deeply, and feel something shift. Then Hurricane Helene took the building in 2024. We fled with what we could carry and landed in Minnesota.

At first it felt like exile. Then it felt like the most honest beginning I had ever had.

this is the short version.
The full one is still being written.

the paintings are the evidence.

Of the healing. Of the living. Of what it cost — and what it gave back.

I paint women. Figures and faces — some clearly defined, some dissolving into abstraction — that emerge through layers of mixed media as if they were always there, waiting to be found. People ask why I always paint women. Because she had been missing from me like a hole in my being. In painting her, I honor her. I heal through her. I declare the truth of her as sacred — in myself, and in the world.

My most recent series — Becoming Whole — is the culmination of nine years of living this story. Five large-scale paintings, each one built around one of Toni Wolff's four feminine archetypes, plus a fifth of my own: the Individuated Woman. The one who holds all of them. Not a destination. A practice.

I also write — essays, poems, and a memoir publishing chapter by chapter on Substack. And I speak. Because standing in a room sharing this story out loud — watching people recognize themselves in it, watching them tear up — is its own form of the work.

discover the work

go deeper

for the ones remembering

This work is for those who’ve been pushed to the edges —
by systems, by silence, by the stories they were told about who they were allowed to be.

The ones who achieved everything and still felt the absence of themselves. The ones somewhere in the middle of becoming — not who they were, not yet who they're arriving at.

The ones finally ready to see themselves in full.

I am not a guru. I am not ahead of you. I am someone who has lived it and kept painting anyway.

and still, i paint

this is who i am now.

An artist unbound.
A woman creating what wants to live.
A woman who chose herself.

The painting was the proof.

If something stirs as you view the work—
you’re already in the conversation.

Welcome.

—Heather Hanson. Artist. Writer. Speaker. The one who lived it first.

behind the canvas

2026 Individual Artist Award, Central Minnesota Arts Board
2026 Artist Career Development Grant, Central Minnesota Arts Board
2025 Featured Artist, Where Women Create magazine
Certified Spiritual Direction, Haden Institute
Certified Spiritual Emotional Intelligence Assessor, Spirit of EQ
BS in Sociology from USNY
Fine artist: mixed media painting, writer, speaker
20+ years marketing & technology leadership in Fortune 500 companies
Entrepreneur & small business owner in St. Cloud, MN
US Navy Russian Linguist & Helicopter Mechanic
Triplet mother
Breast cancer survivor
Serial global traveler
Former Helicopter mechanic & Russian linguist
Worked & lived with family in Stockholm, Sweden for 3 years
Met and married husband of 28 years in Japan
Student of A Course in Miracles

the studio

I paint in Saint Cloud, Minnesota — in a home studio that is mine in a way no space has been since I left corporate life in 2020. For the first time in years, I own the ground I'm standing on.

The canvases are large. The work is alive. And the quiet of this place has given the paintings something I didn't know they were missing.

The Becoming Whole series is currently on view at the Paramount Theater in St. Cloud. If you'd like to connect about the work, commissions, or speaking, find me on the Connect page.