Lou Haney creates paintings of domestic spaces that employ nostalgia as a means of temporary escape from the corrupt and chaotic realities of present day life. Using oil, acrylic, fiber art, and mixed media, she explores themes of memory, yearning, and femininity to evoke tension between fantasy and reality. Inspired by the Pattern and Decoration Movement of the mid-1970s to early 1980s, Haney’s work incorporates floral imagery, pattern, and decoration, dismantling the hierarchy of fine art over craft and blurring the line between art and design.

Born in Decatur, Alabama, Haney received her Bachelor of Arts in Art with a Studio Concentration, cum laude from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, and her MFA in Painting from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. Haney has attended MacDowell as well as the Vermont Studio Center. In 2022, she was a resident at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, Virginia. Haney was the recipient of the Mississippi Art Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in 2008. Her work has been exhibited in solo shows in California, Virginia, Massachusetts, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Kentucky and in over 70 juried group exhibitions. Haney’s work was shown at the Spring/Break Art Fair in New York City in 2022 and 2023. Her work was displayed in solo exhibitions in 2024 at Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, VA and Spectrum Fine Arts in Seattle, WA. She was a finalist for the 2024 Bethesda Painting Prize.

Haney currently teaches Studio Art and Art History at Piedmont Virginia Community College, Sweet Briar College, and Buford Middle School. Haney lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia.