Laura Pharis

Laura Pharis, a native of Roanoke, Virginia, is an artist, printmaker, sculptural doll maker, and musician. For five years she was the director of the Richmond Printmaking Workshop. She was a founder of One/Off Printmakers, a group of professional artists and printmakers exhibiting their original prints worldwide. She is an art professor and Chair of the Studio Art Department at Sweet Briar College.
Education
Laura Pharis earned her B.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1970. She earned an M.F.A. from the
University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1988
Exhibitions
Her art is represented in the permanent collection of Longwood College's Center for the Visual Arts. In 2008, the exhibition Mixed Media by Laura Pharis was shown in Gallery One of Art6 in Broad Street, Richmond Virginia arts district.
A member of One/Off Printmakers, she participated in One/Off: 13 (+1) Richmond Printmakers at Chroma Projects Art Laboratory, on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her art was included in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts traveling One/Off Printmakers portfolio exhibited at Art6 in Richmond, and was shown in 2012 at a One/Off Printmakers group show at Studio Two Three
on Main Street in Richmond.
In 2014 her art was the focus of a one-person show, Anomalies, at Rivermont Studio, a gallery in Lynchburg, Virginia.
As part of Pharis's effort to stop the planned closure of Sweet Briar College, Pharis and others won their court case to keep Sweet Briar open, and they were supported in their effort by Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, who said he would release restrictions on $16 million from the college’s endowment, a sufficient amount to operate the college for the next academic year. Michael Shepherd, the attorney representing the Sweet Briar faculty, said that the settlement agreement for the suit includes "a provision to pay six months severance to all faculty and staff affected by the college’s crisis, including those who were not part of the suit." “It seemed like the odds were so long, but we prevailed,” said Pharis, as she prepared to play the fiddle with her old-time band Bramble & Rose. Pharis, after being on the faculty for 25 years, said that the court case was so stressful that she was "afraid to exhale until this happened.""
Awards
In 2000 Laura Pharis was named Virginia Artist of the Year by the Richmond Women's Caucus for Art. She produced the cover art and illustrations for Cave Wall, a literary journal of poetry. She produced a series of prints for Language, a limited edition book of poetry by Elizabeth Seydel Morgan. She created the cover artwork for the Mike Seeger album True Vine. In 2017, she was the subject of a member spotlight interview with the Virginia Center for the Book.

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