Devann Dononvan Gardner is an interdisciplinary artist and educator originally from Murrells Inlet, SC. Her practice explores memory, nostalgia, and the malleability of personal history through textiles, painting, sculpture, and expanded media. She investigates how her own kitsch childhood, pop culture, and nostalgic anemoia shape identity and distort personal history.
Using labor-intensive processes such as quilting, sewing, painting and assemblage, Donovan transforms fleeting moments into tactile objects that feel both intimate and uncanny. Bright palettes and playful forms operate as visual seduction, like “chewing gum for the eyes,” while beneath the surface her work questions sentimentality, authorship, and the reliability of recollection. By duplicating and recontextualizing imagery from her own archive, she explores how repetition both preserves and alters meaning.

Donovan earned her MFA from Winthrop University. She is the Art Instructor at York Technical College and former Gallery Manager at the Arts Council of York County, where she continues to teach and develop community programming. She also teaches with the Cain Center for the Arts and is co-founder of Carolina Current Artist Collective, supporting regional contemporary artists, remaining deeply engaged in cultivating accessible arts experiences throughout the Carolinas.

Website: www.devanndonovan.com