Leslie Vansen teaches painting and drawing courses from the introductory through graduate levels in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She makes acrylic paintings on canvas and paper that are presented regularly in invitational and juried exhibitions. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections nationwide, including the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Racine Art Museum. The paintings present metaphoric investigations into the functions of work, time and repetitive figurative movement through space, suggesting, by analogy and abstraction, the residue of human action on its immediate environment. During summer 2011 her paintings were featured in the two person opening exhibition for the Town Center Gallery at St. Johns by the Lake in Milwaukee. The work was also the subject of a2008 solo exhibition at Lawrence University's Wriston Art Center Galleries in Appleton. She maintains an ongoing collaborative drawing project titled SiteLines at UWM, and was one of three participating artists along with UWM's Christopher Burns, composer/musician and Luc Vanier, choreographer, in the collaborative performance concert "Triptych" at the Peck School of the Arts Kenilworth Square East studio research center in June 2008.
