Rowena Morrill

Rowena Morrill

Rowena A. Morrill (1944-) is an American artist, working in science-fiction and fantasy illustration. She is credited as being one of the first women artists to impact paperback cover illustration. Books of her own work have included The Fantastic Art of Rowena, Imagine (in France), Imagination (in Germany), and The Art of Rowena. She has also been included in many anthologies, such as, Tomorrow and Beyond and Infinite Worlds.

Morrill received a BA from the University of Delaware in 1971, following which she studied at the Tyler School of Arts. After being dropped from Tyler's program, she took a job at an advertising agency in New York, eventually showing her portfolio to Charles Volpe at Ace Books, who commissioned a romance cover from her. Her first cover for a horror novel was for Jane Parkhurst's Isobel in 1977. and she continued to work in horror, producing cover art for H.P. Lovecraft collections before turning her attention to science fiction and fantasy covers.

Morrill's technique uses oil on illustration board, coating the paintings with a high-gloss glaze and thin coats of paint.

Her paintings have appeared on hundreds of book covers, on calendars, portfolios, trading cards and in magazines such as Playboy, Omni, Art Scene International, and Print Magazine.

She has been nominated for the Hugo Award five times, once for her book The Fantastic Art of Rowena Morrill and four times in the Best Artist category. In 1984, she received the British Fantasy Award

She was named Artist Guest of Honor for Chicon 7, the 70th World Science Fiction Convention, held in 2012.

Following the fall of Baghdad, Morrill's painting King Dragon and Shadows Out of Hell were discovered hanging in a townhouse belonging to Saddam Hussein.

Rowena currently teaches classes at The Kubert School.