Lauren Mills

Lauren A. Mills has won national acclaim as a book author and illustrator and as a sculptor and painter. She was greatly influenced by the 19th century artists, especially the symbolists and the Pre-Raphaelites for their focus of the natural world, sense of wonder and mythical subject matter.

The fourth of five children, Mills grew up playing and pretending in the woods of Connecticut and spent her summers at her grandparents' in West Virginia.

In her teens she moved to Oregon and Minnesota and later lived in Colorado, California and Massachusetts where she resides now. She and her husband, author/illustrator Dennis Nolan collaborated on several projects, most notable, their daughter.

Mills’ wrote and illustrated children’s books from 1986 – 2005 while also studying classical sculpture and occasionally making artist dolls. In 2005 Mills focused on sculpture and classical painting. In 2009-2010 Mills co-founded and curated the Beardsley Gallery and Art Guild in Wilton Connecticut. Mills began writing novels in 2010. Minna’s Patchwork Coat is her first novel that she also illustrated with fifty pencil drawings (Publication date: November, 2015 by Little, Brown).

Lauren Mills received her Bachelors degree in Drawing and Painting from UC Santa Barbara and her Masters degrees in Book Illustration at San Jose State University in California. Mills also studied sculpture, 1992-94 and 2005-2007 at the Lyme Academy of Fine Art and egg tempera in Europe and in the United States. In 2009 and 2010 Mills also studied classical drawing and painting from the ateliers: Grand Central Academy and Bay Area Classical Art Atelier.

Lauren Mills is a visiting associate professor of Children's Book Illustration at the Hollins University MFA Writing and Illustrating Children’s Books summer program in Roanoke, Virginia. Mills has also taught at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts and at Paier College of Art, and at the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford in Connecticut.