Joan Root is both a painter/printmaker and an art historian. She has taught painting and drawing as well as art history for more than thirty years. She lived and exhibited in New York before moving to Washington, DC. In New York, she taught at The New York Academy of Art, New York University, The School for Visual Arts, and Stern College. In Washington, she has been on the faculty of the Corcoran College of Art teaching anatomical figure drawing, of Northern Virginia Community College teaching painting and art history, and has taught figure drawing at American University. In 2000, she spent four months as Visiting Artist at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Joan Root's art is representational. It has been exhibited in galleries in the United States and in Europe. Her works are found in museum collections such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), The National Endowment for the Arts (Washington, DC), Portland Museum of Art, (Portland, Oregon), DeCordova Museum (Lincoln, Massachusetts), Dulin Gallery of Art (Knoxville, Tennessee). She is having an exhibition at the Arts Club of Washington in May 2011.

Root lectures for the National Gallery of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institute and the Kreeger Museum. She also has led art history tours traveling throughout Italy, the Baltics and St. Petersburg for the Smithsonian, as well as to museums in New York, Philadelphia and Washington.

Root holds three graduate degrees: a M.A. in Art Education from City College of New York, a Master in Fine Arts in both Painting and Art History from American University, Washington, DC and a M.A. in Printmaking (lithography and etching) and the History of Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art from Villa Schifanoia/Dominican University in Florence, Italy, awarded while she was a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar. She has published articles on artists ranging from Raphael to Picasso.

In addition, Joan Root is a popular lecturer for Seabourn and Silversea cruises on a wide spectrum of art topics ranging from the Classical Art of Greece and Rome to the Italian Renaissance, to 19th century French, British, and American art to the spectacular Hermitage Collection to the Tropical Inspiration of the Caribbean. She is well known for her signature series "Artists' Secrets: Looking at Painting with an Artist's Eye".

My art is representational, inspired by what I see. I begin by working directly from observation. This perceptual experience serves as the catalyst for its transformation, an ongoing process of distilling and idealizing directed by an internal vision. The goal is to communicate the wonder and pleasure that I had initially experienced.

My goal is simple but not easily attained: to create an image that will bring the viewer a sense of refreshing astonishment, by seeing something familiar which also appears to be, somehow, newly seen.