LaVonna Varnado-Brown

Teaching Artist

Arijino Artistry is an artistic practice sustained by LaVonna Varnado-Brown. She has developed her practice around intentional engagement to inspire through creative expression. LaVonna Varnado Brown is a multidisciplinary artist and community worker. She earned a BA from Southeastern University Louisiana with a focus on Theatre and Liberal Arts. After studying abroad in London and Paris, LaVonna has worked as an installation artist, artist advocate, and teaching artist, in and around New Orleans and with Beginning With Children (Brooklyn based college and career preparatory program). 

LaVonna creates multimedia works (which include: writing, sculptural altars, painting, making in mixed media collage, acrylic) that speak from the experience of a Black mother creatively navigating the American landscape. LaVonna creates art that is AfroFuturistic in aesthetic with odes to history, the Divine Feminine, and floral daydreams abounding. Through her work she hopes to uplift the narrative of rest, joy, resistance, and love. LaVonna is grounding this multimedia work and finding inspiration in community through curating workshops and intentional space to engage in creative grounding practices that raise our spatial awareness and kinesthetic responses to one another and the environment we inhabit.

LaVonna has exhibited work at Tulane Newcomb with LaToya Ruby Frasier, at Diboll Gallery, Longue Vue House & Gardens, LeMieux Gallery, The Bottom (Knoxville, TN), Aquarium Gallery, REACH Center Gallery, Vassar College Art Library (Poughkeepsie, NY), The Front Gallery, and Artist Journey Allen's studio.LaVonna has had multiple residencies with Louisiana Children's Museum, Kolaj Institute, Longue Vue House & Gardens, is a 2025 alumni of the creative cohort at New Orleans Museum of Art, and an alumni for Brackish Water Collective Cohort 3. LaVonna's collage work  has been published in Kolaj magazine and Cut Me Up Magazine. LaVonna has been featured on WHIV, Another Gulf is Possible, on nola.com, Fox 8 WVUE, The Tribune, and Gambit.