Iona Rozeal Brown

Some time after 2013, the artist began using the name Rozeal in place of her full name.

Brown has also made work about voguing, including paintings and performances that feature performers from the House of Ninja. She created the performance, "Battle of Yestermore," for Performa in 2011. She presented paintings inspired by the performers in her exhibition, "Introducing...The House of Bando," at Salon 94 in 2013.

Iona Rozeal Brown is from Washington, DC. She did not begin painting until her twenties. She got her education at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. She then went on to get her BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME (1999), and got her MFA at Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT, in 2002. She lives and works in New York, NY.

Brown's work unites multiple, seemingly irreconcilable cultures. Her fantastical and stylized mixed media paintings combine the style of Japanese prints, hip-hop, and graffiti. Early on in her career she was introduced to ganguro, a 1990s Japanese movement wherein young women would paint their skin darker and dress as their favorite hip-hop stars. Brown's work around this topic was titled "The Blackface Paintings". This series began her quickly growing career. She titled her earliest exhibitions, "a3," for "Afro-Asiatic Allegories."

Iona Rozeal Brown (born in 1966) is a contemporary American painter best known for her narrative canvases commenting on cultural identity. She pulls her inspiration from ukiyo-e printmaking and contemporary hip-hop. She touches upon African-American culture and Japanese ganguro culture, which appropriates black culture.