ARTIST BIO

Amber L. DuBoise-Shepherd depicts contemporary Native American narratives based on her family heritage of Navajo, Sac & Fox, and Prairie Band Potawatomi. Her mixed media pieces and oil paintings reference an illustrative quality. She has an Associates of Art from Seminole State College and completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Spring 2016 at Oklahoma State University. She was accepted into OVAC’s Momentum exhibition in 2017, 2019, 2020, and in 2021 she was accepted as a Spotlight Artist by the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition. She was accepted to Momentum again in 2022. She won grand prize and runner up in the IMAGEN Art Competition: “Native Tradition is Medicine: Resilience and Native Lifeways during COVID-19” in 2020. Two of her art pieces were also selected for the 2021 Native American Female Art and Resilience during the COVID-19 Pandemic 2020-2021 Booklet, Virtual IMAGEN Network. She recently won Honorable Mention inGraphics for the 51st Annual Trail of Tears Art Show & Sale for 2022.

            DuBoise-Shepherd was also a speaker for the Indigenous Arts Ecology presented by First Peoples Fund in Phoenix, AZ. DuBoise-Shepherd was also one of two selected for the first Red Earth’s Emerging Artist Award in 2018 by the Red Earth board for her body of work. She has exhibited at the Southern Plains Indian Museum in Anadarko, OK which consisted of her most recent body of work in her exhibition Tradition Through Modern Eyes 2018. She started off the year 2020 exhibiting at the TAC Gallery in Tulsa, OK for her exhibition Living on the Native Oklahoma Reservation, as well as being accepted into two Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition Exhibition Concept/Survey at the Ahha Gallery in Tulsa, OK. DuBoise-Shepherd exhibited work at the Ahha Gallery in July 2020 for the Re/Convening exhibition and Azhwakwa: Contemporary Anishinaabe Artexhibition at the Jacobson Native Art Center in Norman, OK in August 2020. She exhibited for the Speak: Speak While You Can exhibition at the Living Arts Center in Sept. – Oct. 2020 and again in Sept. – Dec. 2021. She exhibited in the 2021 online exhibition EMERGENCE hosted by the Tulsa Community College in August. In 2022 she has exhibited at several venues and gallery for The March Show: Home at the Paseo Arts and Creativity Center in OKC and This is Place 2022, Community Zine in Little Axe, OK. DuBoise-Shepherd was commissioned by the First Americans Museum in 2020 to create and design an original oil painting that was converted into a large mural that is on display for the public. 

            She has increasingly been showing at different markets to sell and show her work to the public and was accepted previously in the Santa Fe Indian Market, Artesian Native Art Market, Cherokee Art Market, Trail of Tears Art Show, Red Earth Art Festival, and Mvskoke Art Market. She was recently the Manager of Education and Outreach at the Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art from 2019 - 2022. DuBoise-Shepherd is currently the Assistant to the Director for the University of Oklahoma School of Visual Arts. She is married and currently lives in her hometown of Shawnee, OK with her husband Josh Shepherd.