Sanda Iliescu was born in Bucharest, Romania. At age 15, she emigrated to the United States with her mother who was a political refugee. Ms. Iliescu received her graduate education at Columbia University and Princeton where she earned a Master of Architecture degree in 1986. Currently she lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband Paul Lipkowitz and their son Gabriel.

Ms. Iliescu's artworks have been exhibited in NY, NJ, NC and Rome. She has taught drawin and painting at Princeton and SUNY. Among her professional awards are The Rome Prize and The Distinguished Artist Award of the NJ State Council of the Arts. Currently, she holds a joint appontment in art and architecture at the University of VA, where she teaches design and painting, and drawing studios.

Sanda Iliescu works in the media of drawing, painting and collage. She is also interested in larger scale wall drawings and public art: in her recent project, 271 WORDS, 271 people participated in painting hte text of Lincoln's Gettysburg address on the 70-foot-long parapets of a bridge in Charlottesville. Iliescu designed the project in respoinse to a recent rash of sexist and racist hate acts and graffiti on the university campus (http://www.arch.virginia.edu/spotlight/271words).

In conjunction with her artwork, Ms. Iliescu writes on theoretical issues in art. Her essays explore the difficult relationship between social-political issues and ideas of beauty, creativity and the visual imagination. She edited and contributed two chapters to a forthcoming volume with the University of VA Press, The Hand and the Soul: Ethics and Aesthetics in Architecture and Art. She is currently working on a single-author book titled About Drawings: Meditations on How and Why We Draw.