Danielle Gibbs is an artist and educator with over ten years of creative experience in different fields. She considers creative expression to be her passion and the driving influence behind her life's endeavors. Her artistic background is varied and unique. Before attending college, she worked in floral design and makeup artistry. Her formal art education is centered on the elements and principles of art, teaching Fine Arts, and art history. Her art education also includes an emphasis on specialized application in Funeral Service: Interior Design, Cosmetic Application, and Restorative Art sculpture with mixed media. Her digital art techniques are primarily self-taught.

Before becoming a licensed teacher in Virginia, Danielle Gibbs was a licensed funeral director. Art, design, art direction, and content creation were an integral part of her day-to-day career in funeral service. She specialized in restorative art sculpture using wax, clay, and non-traditional media, honed artistic presentation skills, and gained extensive design experience creating customized graphic and written content for print materials, along with creating video productions for services. Her ability to collaborate with clients to create a vision and manage teams of colleagues to deliver exceptional, client-oriented results, while ensuring the details match each client's unique vision, was founded in this field and carries over to her current work.

During her time as a funeral director, she focused on photography as a creative outlet. Her work quickly became noticed and gained recognition. She contributed photos in print and online to local news media, Powhatan Today and the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and received Approver's Choice by Weather Underground (The Weather Channel Company) numerous times for her natural landscape work. She also contributed as a stock photographer to various agencies. Most notably, her photography work was featured as National Geographic Society's Editor's Choice and appeared in an online gallery (May 2012). In 2012, her photography and poetry were published in the book A Celebration of Nature (L.A. Woodley, Ed., The Weather Channel Company, Dundee Books).

More recently, her creative work has focused on self-expression, connection, and visual storytelling through digital illustration and writing. She contributed two emotionally inspiring art pieces to Powhatan Community Church's 14 Days of Prayer project in March 2021. In April 2021, "Drawing Jesus," a written work describing the details of the artistic process, faith, and emotional connection was published as an article by Passion Community Church. She also uses her range of creative skills in graphic design, content writing, and copywriting to develop content for clients.

A native of Long Island, New York, she relocated to Virginia in 2009. She majored in U.S. History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook while simultaneously attending the American McAllister Institute of Funeral Service in New York, NY, where she earned an Associate Degree in Funeral Service. She graduated with high honors from the University of Phoenix in 2018 with a Bachelor of Science in Elementary Education. Her educational background includes extensive research, academic and creative writing, small business management and merchandising, and communication.

Danielle Gibbs is licensed to teach in Virginia with endorsements in Elementary Education PreK-6 and Visual Arts PreK-12. She currently teaches elementary art at a school in central Virginia.

Bio