Joan Gaustad is the author of House Hold (Taylored Printing, 2018), co-authored with Michael Lease, and the visual memoir, Someone’s Missing . . . and I Think It’s Me (VCU Libraries Publishing, 2021). She is the creator of RVA ART, a small zine. With her husband, Gerald Donato, she was awarded the 2007 Theresa Pollak Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She has participated in solo and group shows nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and artist Michael Smith’s installation, It Starts at Home, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Gaustad studied in Bangkok, Thailand, and at the Offenbach University of Art and Design in Germany and received her BFA from the VCU School of the Arts in 1974.