Eileen Love O'Donnell attended Stonehill College in Massachusetts and graduated from Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, where she studied art and illustration. Soon after she joined the Peace Corps as a visual communications volunteer in Yemen. She completed language and culture training, and developed visual materials and props to communicate complex subjects to a largely illiterate audience. Eileen's love of communicative and meaningful visuals led to a career in advertising working first as an art director in advertising agencies in New York and Connecticut, and then, in 1996, Ms. O’Donnell helped to originate a successful advertising agency in New Haven, Connecticut, where she works as Creative Director. She has won Art Director and marketing awards for her creative concepts and unique designs, and her company continues to grow and develop. Ms. O'Donnell spends her time running her business, creating original artwork, and traveling to out-of-the-way adventurous locations. Her volunteer work includes marketing for non-profit organizations and schools, health research, health education for women and children, classroom talks on the importance of volunteering, and portfolio reviews for local college art students preparing for interviews. She is a member of the Women’s Business Development Center, the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, and the Shoreline Arts Association. Her artwork has been shown and sold in restaurants, exhibitions, local shops, and galleries.

Artists Statement

Ms. O'Donnell's vision is drawn from the perspective that she has gained through personal, professional, and travel experience.  Having witnessed and been immersed in cultures vastly different than her own, she has gained a broader view of the world; of the differences inherent in diverse cultures, and the striking similarities that we all share.  Ms. O’Donnell’s abstract work succinctly captures her desire to discover what draws us together and what defines us as unique.  Her singularly distinctive mixed media pieces set up boundaries of space and design and simultaneously disregards them, creating a sense of expressive free thought.  Ms. O'Donnell's pastel life pieces focus on the manipulation of light through a vibrant color palette that, as in her abstract work, does not merely fill space, but creates it. Eileen Love O'Donnell's artwork draws from our shared emotions, rhythms, senses, and visions, while illustrating the freedom of the individual spirit. It finds the place in all of us between what is universal, and what is uniquely ours as individuals.