Lea Barton Biography Lea Barton was born in Yazoo City, Mississippi, but because her father served in the Navy, Lea moved from city to city as a “Navy brat.” No matter where she lived, however, each summer Lea returned to Yazoo City on a Greyhound bus to visit her grandparents on Wolf Lake. Lea entered college late in life at the age of 36, graduating from Millsaps College in Jackson in 1996. She then lived in Brooklyn, New York for two years where she obtained her MFA from Pratt Institute in 1998. In 2002 and 2003 paintings from her series, Paradox in Paradise, was the subject of a catalogue and traveling exhibition to venues in Mississippi and Louisiana; and she has been the recipient of two Visual Arts Fellowships awarded by the Mississippi Arts Commission, the most recent award in 2004 for her series of mixed medium paintings entitled Sunday Morning. She has also been selected four times for the Mississippi Invitational biennial exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art. Her work has appeared in Southern Cultures, Contemporary Impressions, and Deep Magazine. In 2004 Lea’s work was exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and at the New Orleans Museum of Art as a part of the 2005 New Orleans Triennial. She is represented by Cole Pratt Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Perry Nicole Fine Art, Memphis, Tennessee. Lea will be exhibiting in fall 2006 at Southside Gallery, Oxford, Mississippi.