Jo-Ann Lowney, born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, spent her childhood traveling back and forth to Europe, Florida, and Boston with her mother, a State Department employee. Moving to Maine in the 1970s, she owned and operated Sun Building and Interior Design, a company specializing in the accurate historic renovation of residences and public buildings in Portland, Maine. In the 1980s, she studied design and painting at the Maine College of Art. Lowney then relocated to New York City in order to study drawing and painting under the instructor Frank Mason, NA, at The Art Students League of New York.
After studies were completed and newly married, Lowney moved with her husband, Joel Coplin, also a student of Frank Mason, to Mesa, Arizona. There, they found an ideal studio and living space near the active art and gallery scene, which was happening in Scottsdale.
In 1995, she was awarded the Visual Art Fellowship in two-dimensional Media by the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and in 1996, an Artists Residency Grant by the Arizona Commission on the Arts for the mural project, A History of Superstition Mountain. Her work is in the collection of the Scottsdale Museum for Contemporary Art, Nordstrom’s of Scottsdale, McDonald’s Corporation offices worldwide, Universal Pictures Studios, and private and corporate collections in the U.S., Portugal, Germany, Israel, and Canada. Currently, she owns and directs Gallery 119 in Phoenix, AZ, and serves as Secretary of the Board for the Museum of Arizona Artists (MOAZA).
