Raised in Chicago, Rowan grew up visiting all new exhibits at the Art Institute. When she was five years old, she saw the King Tut exhibit and became immediately enamored with it, touring its splendor three times. One of her mother’s close friends was an artist who sold her paintings through the Art Institute, and her example planted a lifelong desire in Rowan to become an artist. Rowan went on to attend classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago every summer and exhibited her artwork in the museum before graduating from high school.
With her curiosity about antiquity, artifacts, and social structures ignited in her formative years by the King Tut exhibit, she went on to graduate from the London School of Economics with a concentration in Sociology. While living abroad she traveled extensively to Japan, Holland, and the British Isles, where her experiences began informing her most enduring concepts about art, in particular. The influence of religious art, ruins, folk art, textiles and the natural world permeate her content and technique.
Rowan has worked extensively in multiple mediums throughout her nearly 40 years as an artist, integrating properties from each discipline into her approach. Sculptural dimensionality, rhythmic musicality, and. emotive poeticism culminates into a highly specialized style characterized by dynamic patterns and bold color structure. She currently resides in the desert, incorporating its unusual life-forms into her vocabulary.